Electricity here is expensive and metered, and I cook a braise or a stew about three times a week. Everyone says the slow cooker is the frugal option but eight hours sounds like a lot of hours. I already own the cooker and an electric oven, and I am considering a pressure cooker as a third option before I commit.
I wasted about a year assuming that low used half the power of high. It does not work that way on most models, both settings use the same heating element and low simply spends more of each cycle off, so a long low cook can use more total energy than a shorter high one. Once I understood that I started using high for the first hour and low for the rest, which gets the pot into a safe temperature range faster too.
If cost per meal is genuinely your first concern, the electric pressure cooker beats both by a distance. Mine draws around a kilowatt while it is coming up to pressure and then almost nothing while it holds, and a stew that takes eight hours in the slow cooker is done in about thirty five minutes plus the time to get there. Texture is not identical, shredded meat is great and anything that wants a long gentle collapse is slightly worse, but the energy difference is not subtle.
I keep resisting the pressure cooker because I like coming home to a cooked house, but the numbers are hard to argue with for weeknights.
Buy a plug meter, measure both, stop guessing. Everything else in this thread including my own answer is somebody else's appliance.
The oven comparison is unfair as usually stated. Nobody heats an oven to braise one pot: I put the braise in, a tray of potatoes below it and bread on the top shelf for the last twenty minutes, so the energy is amortised across three things. Judged per dish cooked, my oven is competitive with the cooker, and it is the only one of the two that browns anything.
@hem_and_haw · 2mo ago · 3 replies
I put a plug in energy meter on mine because I got tired of the argument. My six litre cooker on low sat in the low hundreds of watts and, crucially, cycles rather than drawing constantly, so a full day of cooking came out around one kilowatt hour. My oven pulls well over two kilowatts when the element is on but also cycles once it reaches temperature, so an hour of braising landed somewhere near one to one and a half. So they are closer than the folklore suggests, and the honest answer is that a plug meter costs very little and answers it for your exact appliances.
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@shallow_well_shea · 2mo ago
That is a much smaller gap than I expected. I assumed the cooker was five times cheaper.
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@tiny_launch_tess · 2mo ago
The saving is real but modest. The reason to use it is that dinner cooks while you are out, not that it halves your bill.
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