Going to look at a house later today, beautiful location, gardens etc, but it has electric central heating. Not having looked round i’m not quite sure how it works but presume it will be some form of economy 7. Is this going to cost a fortune to run, has anyone got this type of heating installed?

Its terrible

heat up some bricks at night in the hope they heat your house during the day!

I would be looking to see if mains gas was in the street or other heading was viable

Is this going to cost a fortune to run, has anyone got this type of heating installed?

Yes, parents cottage. It’s rubbish and very expensive. Rip it out and get an oil fired CH system if you can’t get gas.

DJ, I have had a look at the radiators and it looks like it is a ‘wet’ system rather than storage heaters. Changing the system isn’t an option as it is a rented property.

I currently rent a place with storage heaters which run off economy 7 and they are rubbish – i’m trying to buy the place in which case I would take great delight in putting gas central heating in!

The cost is actually about the same as gas central heating for me, but the real problem is that they heat up overnight from 11.30pm to 6.30am, so at about 4am the house is roasting hot. From 6.30am onwards it’s cooling down… So the morning is ok, my cat Alice gets to spend the day in a warm-ish house, and by the time I get in from work at 6pm it’s prety cold and continues to get colder until 11.30pm again!

I rely on a real fire for heat in the evenings to be honest!

The other thing is hot water – if it’s all electric, then the tank of water heats up again during the economy 7 hours. It does stay pretty hot all day, but whatever hot water you use is topped up in the tank with cold water – hence making it colder. So nice hot showers in the morning are fine, as are hot baths at night if you have not used any other hot water. Doing both is a problem 😉 I can use a ‘boost’ to heat the tank again but this is expensive.

As you can tell, I have devoted a great deal of time and effort to understanding this utterly rubbish system in an attempt to work with it. My conclusion is that if you work all day, you can’t.

If you like the house, buy it, rip out all the electric rubbish and put nice cerntral heating and a boiler in!

We have storage heaters in our flat and were a bit worried about them when we moved in, however having spent two winters with them they are not so bad. Obviously they aren’t as controllable as gas central heating but if you keep an eye on the weather and turn them up and down the day before accordingly they do a good job of keeping the flat at a steady warm temperature, and our electricity bill is more or less the same as our previous flat which had gas central heating (gas and electric combined)

so not as bad as everyone makes out

Looked at an electric CH boiler for an Economy7 heated flat I had years ago. Was way too pricey. Spent less money moving house in the end. You could also get electric radiators, not those horrid looking oil filled ones, these were just normal looking rads but for their own built-in boiler. Again, stupidly expensive.

This was an ex-council flat so poorly insulated & very prone to damp. If you had modern levels of insulation, so the proprty lost little heat then the storage heaters would work well.

Parents have storage heaters, and they don’t seem awful – tho’ I’ve no idea what they cost to run.

I suspect the fact that there’s always someone in all day makes the difference though, the way they heat seems like a bad idea if you’ll be out all day.

Cheers folkes but I am pretty sure looking at the radiators that it is not a storage heater system, the radiators look like normal ones. Just wondering if anyone else has this system and rough running costs, the house is an average size 3 bed semi. Does have a coal fire though 🙂