Cost to run an electric oven or stove

An electric oven draws close to full rated power during preheat, then cycles its elements to hold temperature. Once at temperature the average draw is often only a third of the rating, because the thermostat only re-energises the element as heat escapes. That means a one-hour bake does not use one hour of rated power.

The duty cycle below combines the full-power preheat with the lower-power hold. For short bakes the preheat dominates and the effective duty cycle is higher; for long roasts it is lower. Self-clean cycles are the exception — they run at high power for hours and can cost more than a week of normal baking.

An electric range combines an oven and a cooktop, and they are separate loads. The oven's bake and broil elements are one load; each stovetop element (burner) is another, with its own rating. The range's nameplate rating adds everything up as if all elements ran at once, which rarely happens — it sizes the circuit, not your electricity use. To estimate a stovetop element, enter that element's watts in the calculator, the hours it is on, and a duty cycle for its setting (elements cycle at medium settings).

Preheat is the most expensive part of any bake because the elements run at full power. Cooking two dishes in one session instead of two separate bakes halves the number of preheats — modelled here as one hour of oven use a day becoming half an hour on average.

Ranked by annual running cost at each appliance's default usage pattern, this electric oven is number 10 of 16 in the SnapEnergyLab catalogue — $59.76 per year at $0.180/kWh. The appliances either side of it: