All, I’m buying a house with an Economy 10 heating/hot water system. It’s probably about 6years old, appears to be a pumped system (not night storage heaters), and i’m told that they get the E10 period during 3 periods through the day – as opposed to just during the middle of the night for E7.

Can anyone on here tell me if it’s good/bad/indifferent?
The vendors were trying to sing its praises, but IMO they should have just paid out for having gas run to the house when they started renovating it & put in a combi!

I know very little about it, but we’re probably stuck with it as there’s no gas supply into the house.
They’ve probably nobbled me having solar cells fitted to the roof as well…

Dont know much about economy10, but I had a house with an electric central heating system a few years ago. It was dreadful and cost a fortune to run, a big fortune.

That is my fear… Currently considering having gas brought in from the street!

I had a house with electric boilers on E10. It cost me on average £300 pcm to run. And that is with us doing all the washing etc. in the cheap hours. And the boilers were pants, constantly went wrong and needed 3 phase!

It was a fairly large new 4 bed place which was always cold. Even on a warm summer day. We used to joke that it had been built on a burial ground. In the end it was one of the reasons why we sold up and moved to an old 3 bed with gas and an £80 pcm elec/gas bill!

You could opt for oil which would save the cost of getting gas to the property .

theboyneeds – Member
I had a house with electric boilers on E10. It cost me on average £300 pcm to run. ….

What the actual ****?!?!
I’m thinking about asking to see their previous 6months bills to make sure they aren’t trying to dupe us!
They reckoned approx. £100 pcm & claimed the house is well insulated, etc. blah blah…. It’s probably not a deal breaker, but now i’m thinking about it…

We probably could fit oil at the end of the garden, but I think i’d rather not rely on that for the future.

Yeah sorry – not an exaggeration. The house was a money pit. I suspect it was just a cold house, surrounded by trees, in a frost pocket, next to a stream, on heavy clay etc. But my three neighbours with virtually identical systems had the same bills. Two of them installed log burners to try to counter the bills.

I looked into oil and gas delivered, but they weren’t cheap. Mains gas was nowhere near us so no chance. Ground source and water source heat pumps were out as we didn’t have enough land or water. And air source was likely to be unreliable as it is pretty ineffective below 5c. And in the winter it was colder than that for a fortnight at a time.

So we packed up!

Erm… this house isn’t near Bordon is it?

I have ec10 and when I did up the house getting gas was too expensive as the main was nowhere near me

My ec10 just runs the water storage heater and the radiators. Other rate meter does the rest.

Works well I’ve enough water and heat on tap and it’s much cheaper than anyone else I know. I average 100 a month for all my electric so cheap as chips imho I won’t be changing anything in a hurry

Before we moved into our current house we rented a 2 bed flat in a former mansion house and as you can imagine, the rooms were quite substantial. The heating was economy 10. The heating was awful.

From memory the problems were:

Heating coming on during the day when it was blazing sunshine and off at night when it was colder (no control).

Expensive bills (electricity costs more than gas regardless of how you cut it).

And the real kicker – little if any choice of provider. Up here our provider proper is Scottish Power and it was them we had to deal with for E10. They make the term useless seem almost complimentary. We did eventually find out we could go with E-On but IIRC they were almost as bad and involved months of messing about getting charged at the wrong tariff because operators couldn’t understand the difference between ‘seven’ and ‘ten’.

Honestly, it put me right off and if it came down to it I’d probably avoid any property with it attached unless I knew I could get rid of it.

theboyneeds – Member
Erm… this house isn’t near Bordon is it?

Nope, South Somerset.

We’re on E7, no gas supply to flat, storage heaters for heating and just two of us. We pay ~£65pcm to Scottish Power, only annoyance is the heaters will consume electricity outside e7 time (2330-0630) during the winter if the inputs are on, I have to remember to go around the flat turning the inputs off when I get up.

E10 – is this also known as Total Control Total Heating?

If so, be prepared to be shafted.

The electricity company (you know, the folk who’s job it is to make money from you) are in charge of how much electricity the system uses to charge up. This is from their HQ (ours was Perth HQ), so not that closely related to the small Highland valley we lived in. So, you set a temperature and some suit in an office with sales targets gets to choose how much energy it will take to get that warm in your house. hmmmmm

The ‘pleasure’ of this system was the £250 a month direct debit we ran for three years, reduced to £220 when I phone up to complain about the unit price of much of the energy (the heating circuit is on a different meter/timing to the rest of the house). This was modern 4 bed house.

It’s not the same matt.

Not all E7/E10 is bad.
I have the quantum storage heaters in my flat and they do not leak heat like the old inefficient units where it would be boiling hot during the day in order to have enough heat in the evening.
They have a computer inside that learns how much to input and you can tell it that you are ‘out all day’ or ‘in all day’ and it adjusts accordingly.
I pay about £480-£500 a year.

there’s a few things to think about…..

the system you’ve got (from your description of a pumped not storage electric system) means that the system doesn’t ‘store’ energy like old night storage heaters.

this is bad and good…bad – the economy 10 tariff with its 3 cheap rate periods wont be that useful as it will mean you have to have the heating on during those periods usually any 10 hours in the -9-12am, 2-5pm and 7-midnight slots. you should check with the leccy company when the cheap rates are and decide how well that fits with your lifestyle.

good – there’s not much more than replacing the leccy boiler with a gas one in terms of switching fuels (there’ll be pipework and stuff to move but the rads and distribution system should be the same).

i’d get hold of the EPC and look at the estimated annual heating load. you’ll average in the region of 10-11p/kWh for leccy and 3.5-4p/kWh for gas so do the maths, work out your annual saving and then look at the cost of getting gas to the house and swapping the boiler. you can then decide if its worth it.

And the real kicker – little if any choice of provider. Up here our provider proper is Scottish Power and it was them we had to deal with for E10. They make the term useless seem almost complimentary. We did eventually find out we could go with E-On but IIRC they were almost as bad and involved months of messing about getting charged at the wrong tariff because operators couldn’t understand the difference between ‘seven’ and ‘ten’.

Yes this too. I spent months untangling a huge bill because the meter reader didn’t realise it was an E10 meter.

And the other point is whether you’ll need to fire the electric boilers outside of the E10 hours? eg. if your E10 finsishes at 4pm and starts again at 8pm then you’ve got four hours to keep the kids warm on the expensive elctricity.

It was a ball ache!

All, thanks for the info, much appreciated.
EPC online just rated as lower E band, unsuprisingly. I’m guesstimating about £6k for gas pipe street-work & gas boiler fitting.
Going to ask to see last 6months bills to see if the vendors fibbed about how much it costs to run. Not a deal-breaker but need to plan renovation budget.

No gas for me, and i’m ~£50pcm on E7 with old crappy storage heaters.
Anything over £100pcm and they’d have to be hair drying the cat 8 hours a day imo

If it’s a wet system consider also solar water, PV with or without immersion heater, GS or AS heat pumps.

Also consider the life of a gas system. There is still a drive to remove fossil fuel burning in the UK, with some fairly heavy weight studies pursing the issue. Hydrogen instead of natural gas is being considered, but the alternative is back to electricity.

I don’t have a recommendation – just things to think about.

Intriguing… I hadn’t though about the heat recovery systems… I think GS is outside my budget, unsure how PV will work with this dual-meter nonsense but will look into it once we move. The roof faces south-south-west so should be ideal for it.

If you have a water tank do check out solar water – there are some very (cost) effective DIY solutions.

And if you go PV and have a water tank you should be able to avoid exporting so the dual meter won’t make a jot of difference. (And PV would normally output during the high rate period on your economy tariff anyway but check that)

I wouldn’t mind some kind of solar thing to heat the immersion heater for free when it has power. Might have to look into it as never thought about it tbh

IIRC during my studies GS was about the same price as a new gas connection. Whether that was a shallow or borehole job though I can’t recall.

GS comes to best part of £10k or so I think, but we don’t have good enough garden access/space to do it