Relative Cost of Owning and Using Traditional and Innovative Cooking Appliances

A matrix was developed to provide a framework to organize information and compare the relative cost in monetary and human resources of owning and using traditional and innovative residential major cooking appliances. Laboratory data collected by the first author and by other university researchers with the same five types of cook tops and a microwave oven were analyzed with ANOVA, Student-Newman-Keuls, and Tukey's HDS procedures. Data were then used to complete the matrix comprising monetary and human resource dimensions thought to contribute to the total cost of ownership and use. Each dimension was assigned a weight to represent its level of importance to consumers. Based on the data, appliances were ranked high, medium, or low on each dimension of the matrix, and a total score was developed for each appliance. The microwave oven received the highest score, followed in order by cooktops with conventional gas burners, conventional electric coils, solid elements, and induction elements. Additional work is needed to refine data collection techniques, to expand the data set to include all types of major appliances currently available for surface cooking, and to validate the content and weights of the matrix.