That boiling water is a contentious topic of discussion is clear, but what about hot air? When you take a 12 VDC, 280 Watt-rated air fryer and pit it against a bog-standard 240 VAC, 1400 Watt unit, which one would you want to use when you’re doing some camping or other exciting off-the-grid opportunities? Unlike with boiling water the physics aren’t as clear-cut here, so [Cahn] did some testing to figure out exactly what the efficiency numbers look like
Since air fryers rely on the transfer of thermal energy from the resistive heating element into the food, any thermal energy that’s not immediately transferred is effectively wasted. This, combined with the relatively low power rating and thus much higher time demand of the low-voltage air fryer is enough to set one’s expectations pretty low.
As scientific test samples chicken nuggets were used with the test, following a preheating period for the 12 VDC unit. Both units managed to hit a safe temperature inside the nuggets after 20 minutes, thus successfully staving off food poisoning, but the browning with the 240 VAC air fryer was much better.
As for the efficiency, the 12 VDC unit required 150 Wh for 20 minutes plus the 10 minutes of preheating, with 45 minutes total at 225 Watt to get proper browning. Meanwhile the 240 VAC unit burned through 250 Wh in 20 minutes, with no pre-heating, though only 230 Wh with no inverter losses included. As a final test, the 12 VDC unit was run at 400 Watt using 14.6 VDC input, which did indeed get it up to temperature much faster.
Thus both are equivalent, just with the caveat that the low-voltage unit will take considerably more time to get the same result. This mirrors the results with boiling water, where most options mostly vary in how much time they require to get water up to a boiling temperature.
Too many nits to pick.
Instead: https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units
I could peck at the 18 icons on that appliance on the right in the still and wonder why not words, where is this thing we are going with. Units smunits, words must remain. Just try and describe an icon on the phone, it will sound silly.
next step… an USB powered air fryer.
DC one is 280 Watt meanwhile usb max specs is 240W. So not impossible, and running it out of power-bank would be nifty.
Well in theory the latest USB PD spec can do 240w (48v 5A), so maybe.
If you need more, just add a second USB PD cable or even more in parallel. Reminds me on those old external USB-A disk drives where 500mA was not enough.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060820175540/http://xe.bz/aho/24/ Well there’s the classic Cooking Bacon with USB, using thirty USB 1.1 ports giving 500mA each.
What the…I JUST put an air fryer in my amazon basket less than 5 minutes ago and now I see a post about it on hackaday…
These events happens very often, with hackaday
We’re watching you! :)
No, just a coincidence.
So they use resistive heating to heat the air?
Why not use a microwave with a blower then? Dries less out.
Microwaves are very underrated. They are the correct device for many food situations.
But they cook very very differently than a convection oven / air fryer. You will get totally different textures.
Convection heating is great for situations where you want a crisp or browned texture. (Fried chicken, pizza crust)
Microwave heating is great for situations where you want a steam-y texture (Soup, potatoes, beans).
Someday I would love to have a “convection microwave” which can do both at the same time. I bet that offers many cooking shortcuts without the compromise. And LLMs can easily adapt recipes for you now.
Plenty of those on the market here in the EU, thoigh they are called microwave combi’s or some such. Tough they do it sequential by first waving, then using a grill or hot air convection. All pre programmed ..
“Air fryer” or regular oven, food prepared by baking is still a major carcinogenic hazard comparable to smoking. If you want to live a long, healthy life you should eat unprocessed or boiled food only.
I rather take a small risk than spend the rest of my (supposedly then long) years eating boiled chicken, thank you very much! :-D
How is 240V remotely regular? We gonna plug an air fryer to our welder receptacle? Move the dryer? Yeah, normal in the UK. Nothing regular about that.
Pretty much all of Europe uses 240VAC, so completely normal.
A quick look at Wikipedia says that more countries use 220-240VAC than use 120VAC. Since India and China are in the 220-240VAC group, that also means that more people use that voltage than 120.
So, yeah. Completely normal.
Forgot the link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country
The video is from Australia, where 240 V is totally regular.