Contents: Recommendations | Energy Efficiency

Recommendations:
New toasters have features including bagel, toast, defrost, warm, LED displays, ....
Extra long slots for home-baked or country-style bread can waste energy.
Two slice models range in price from $12 at WalMart to $78 for a KitchenAid KTT3400B 2-Slice Toaster with Bagel and Warm Functions

The best buy toaster at Consumer Reports with a score of 70 (high was 75 low was 36) was the Proctor-Silex Cool-Touch 22203 ($18).

One Amazon comment on a highly rated $70 toaster was,
- The first thing I noticed was that the center elements of the toaster did not get as red as the outside elements. Thus I was worried that the bread would toast darker one side than the other, and that was the case.
- One side (2 slots) of the toaster refused to work on the third attempt. It would not latch down.
- I had to set the control to 5.5 (the highest setting is 6) to toast multigrain bread to a medium color. I would guess that a setting of 1 or 2 would just slightly warm the bread.
  This toaster seems to be optimized for bagels. I want a toaster that is optimized for toast!

When I was a kid, we had toasters that went tick tick tick, toasted the bread just right and then dinged, and didn't cost much. Why can no one make a decent toaster like that now?
This toaster had 21 1-star reviews out of 125 total.

So, read the reviews before you buy.

Energy Efficient Toasters:
The Morphy Richard - Energy Efficient Ecolectric Toaster (see Review at reuk.co.uk) costs $47 and has a lid covering the top to trap heat and make it more efficient. (Energy efficient toasters at green-energy-efficient-homes.com, thinks it is not worth it.)
You could cover your toaster with a piece of tin foil. At the above link they tried it and got about 30% faster toasting (76 vs 107 sec.).

Infrared Toasters, toast faster but the inside of the bread is still soft. InfraredToaster.com listed a a Black & Decker ($30) and West Bend ($16) which were both out of stock at amazon.

The Kenwood TTM100 allows you to turn off one side if you are only doing one slice. I could only find it on UK sites. (£27 about $42)

The Hamilton Beach SmartToast 22408 (score=68 at consumer reports) ($29) has one long slot for 2 regular slices or one slice of home-baked or country-style bread.
The trick of covering it would probably work better for one slice because all of the heat would be used for the one slice.


At green-energy-efficient-homes.com they say,
"There are toasters that bill themselves as energy efficient, but the claims don't really stand up to scrutiny, in my view.

For most households, the amount of energy a toaster uses over the course of a year is pretty miniscule. For instance, a 900 watt toaster used for four slices a day for a year consumes only about 20 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
If you switched a 100 watt incandescent bulb for a 25 watt CFL, on a fixture used 2 hours per day, you'd save 55 kwh per year, or nearly three times what the toaster consumes. So serious energy savers can toast their bread with a clear conscience, and focus on other energy saving activities.

They also warn of toasters that come with LED lights. Even though LED's are really low power a 1-watt LED uses about 8 kwh if it's on throughout an entire year.

Links:
Energy efficient toaster
Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster -- from scratch | Video on TED.com
Best Toasters - Toaster Reviews & Guides 2012
Best Toasters | Top Picks and Reviews at ConsumerSearch


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last updated 31 Mar 2012