stews, curries, stock, pulses, joints
Advanced options
Pressure raises water's boiling point to ~120C: cooking 60-70% faster in a sealed pot that stops heat and steam escaping: a 2-hour oven casserole becomes ~35 pressurised minutes at ~0.7 kWh total. The honest comparison triangle: pressure cooker beats oven and hob heavily, roughly ties the slow cooker on energy (slow + low vs fast + sealed) and beats it on forgot-to-start-it-at-8am flexibility. Cheap cuts are the real saving: brisket, shin and pulses cook like premium cuts at pressure: the meat bill drops more than the electric bill.
What The Pressure Cooker Savings Calculator Works Out
- Old way vs pressure: the energy a long cook uses by the old method against about 0.7 kWh in a pressure cooker. Sealing the pot raises the boiling point to around 120C, so collagen breakdown and starch gelatinisation run 60% to 70% faster: a two-hour oven casserole's 2.4 kWh becomes 35 pressurised minutes.
- Saving per year: the kilowatt-hours saved per meal x the electricity unit rate (the current Ofgem price cap rate by default) x meals a week x 52. Three stews a week saved from the oven is GBP 130-odd a year, and the payback line shows how many months a GBP 60 stovetop model takes to repay itself.
- The time dividend: meals a year multiplied by the roughly 84 minutes each pressurised cook saves over the two-hour original, returned to you as hours.
- Electricity unit rate (advanced): defaults to the current Ofgem price cap unit rate; change it for your tariff. Hob users on gas can enter a lower rate, though the gas hob's kWh figure is also higher.
- Pressure cooker energy and price (advanced): edit for your pot: stovetop models cost GBP 40 to GBP 80, electric multi-cookers GBP 60 to GBP 120 and use a similar 0.6 kWh to 0.8 kWh per long cook.
- Minutes saved per meal (advanced): adjust the time dividend for your recipes; dried chickpeas cook in 40 unsoaked minutes and stock in an hour instead of an afternoon.
- Saving on cheaper cuts (advanced): pressure renders shin, brisket, cheek, oxtail and dried pulses to premium texture, so the butcher's bill drops. Enter the per-meal saving and the total card adds it to the electricity: it is usually the larger figure.
- Versus a slow cooker (advanced): a slow cooker's low wattage over eight hours lands near 0.9 kWh, roughly a tie with pressure on energy. The card shows which is cheaper at your settings.
- Five-year saving and electricity saved (advanced): five years of total savings less the purchase price, and the annual kilowatt-hours avoided with an approximate CO2 figure.