The club that does the math

Why this site exists

Air fryers are marketed on a single claim — they save energy versus your oven — and yet not one of the big "best air fryer" guides tells you what one actually costs to run. They'll list a "9-in-1" function count, a star rating with no source, and a price that was typed in once and left to rot. What they won't give you is a real basket capacity, an honest note on the coating, a single machine they'd tell you to skip, or the arithmetic behind the energy claim.

We started Preheat Club to be the version of that page we wished existed: a comparison table you can read in one screen, prices pulled live from Amazon rather than remembered, honest cons on every pick, at least one machine per roundup we tell you not to buy — and, the part nobody else does, the running-cost math worked out and reproducible.

Who writes it

Preheat Club is written by Stephen V., an enthusiast — someone genuinely interested in kitchen gear, not a chef with a test kitchen or an engineer with a lab. That framing is deliberate and honest. We are not going to put on a lab coat and imply a credential we do not hold. What Stephen V.brings instead is patience with the boring parts: reading the manuals, comparing the published specs, and doing the sums — the real cost to run a machine, the difference between two air fryers that look identical on the shelf, and what a coating actually is. There's a fuller author page here.

How we compete without a lab

The pages that rank above us are led by real test labs — publications that genuinely cook in twenty machines. We cannot imitate that honestly, so we do not try. We compete on the one thing almost all of them skip: the running-cost math, plus radical transparency of method. Every safety claim is traced to a primary source — a food-safety agency, a manufacturer's documentation, published electricity data. Every price comes from a live feed. Our scoring rubric is published, so a 7 on one page means the same as a 7 on another. And where the evidence is thinner than the marketing, we say so on the page.

Read the how we review page for the full method, our editorial policy for how we handle independence and corrections, and the affiliate disclosure for exactly how the site is funded.

Independence & funding

Preheat Club is published by Type 5 Marketing LLC and funded by affiliate commissions — mostly Amazon. When you buy through one of our links we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That is the entire business model, and it is worth being blunt about what it does and does not buy: it never changes a verdict, we accept no sponsored placements, and we accept no free products in exchange for coverage. A recommendation you cannot trust is worthless to you and, eventually, to us.

Found a factual error? Tell us — we correct material mistakes within 48 hours and note them on the page.