Our 3 bed bungalow has no gas and only one Woodturner. We are thinking of putting in wet central heating fired by a 9kw electric boiler. Any experiences regarding economy and noise i concerns to be aware of? I am hyper sensitive to noise and we have ruled out electric radiators for their noise issues….

I’d look at ashp to augment a wet electric system

I thought electricity was the most expensive way to heat a house at the cost of KwH?

IS there not a cheaper alternative – pellet boiler or some such though you will lose some controlability I guess

No idea on noise but i guess all that is running is a pump that you could hear so dont put it in your bedroom

We had it in a rented house. You can turn it on and watch the electric meter go into overdrive! Heat output was like an asthmatic coughing. I wouldn’t dream of even renting a house with an electric central heating system, let alone buying one.

Tbh if you wanted to heat a house electrically you may as well just put a fan/panel heater in each room and remove the wet system inefficiency and installation cost.

Woukd go Ashp as stoner said if your going with electric. Just make sure the company you choose is MCS registered and you’ll be able to claim Rhi payments which over 7 years will typically cover 3/4s to the full amount of the install cost.

Ok, so not a lot of love for electric boilers… will do some research on ashp’s… but I thought they were quite noisy things? We do have solar pv which does heat our hot water (mostly) if that makes any difference.

If you can get a system that stores heat so you can use an economy 7 or 10 tariff then maybe, that’s about twice the price per kWh as gas, a standard electric tariff will be 3 times as much.

The traditional solution here would be an oil fired boiler.

We have installed electric boilers on about 4 large housing schemes in the last 2 years. We used the Heatrae stadia elecromax 6kw boilers. To date we have had no issues with them or anyone complaining about heating bills. Be aware these have a storage vessel for hot water and this uses a separate 3kw immersion heater with a second as a boost if ever required. So 6kw could be nudging 12kw if everything was going hell for leather (never happens).
These are pretty much silent running.

We get these through the Part L or SAP building regs requirements for new builds so they can’t be that bad?
I would consider this as an option.

Air source heat pumps are ok but you need to accommodate and external condenser plus internal hydro unit. They work best with under floor heating. If you have radiators be careful to get them properly sized to compensate for the lower generated heat. Don’t expect to use existing rads. The hot water is just about hot enough but again you won’t get it proper scolding (if that’s a thing you require?). Also if you live in Aberdeen then this won’t work anywhere near as well as on the south coast.

You dont need an “internal Hydro unit” if you use a monoblock system.

You can have aluminium radiators that are half the size of over sized ones.

Hot water is just about hot enough? Most units will get to 50c for hot water and a legionella purge one a week to get it to 60c although this can be set every day. Plus there’s high temp units that dont require over sized radiators and can get hot water to 60c

Most heat pumps will work effectivley down to around -8c with some big improvements coming in later this year and in the next few years moving on to different refridgerants.

ASHPs can indeed be noisy.
Oil fired boiler is probably the simplest, and on a par with mains gas for cost.