[Closed] Storage heaters v electric radiators. Help!

No experience like yours but I'd say spending loads of money installing a new electric heating system is a false economy, I reckon you'd be better off sticking with what you have and using it at little as possible - wood is free if you look for it constantly and would be a free source of heat to heat your whole house.

What does your hot water ?

What you do depends on your plans for future.

Short term or rental id be tempted to stick in electic rads

Long term id be looking to stick in an oil or space dependant pellet boiler....and wet radiator system.

Your leccy bill bust be astronomic.- what Area of the shire you in without gas. Annoyingly i can see the gas main from my front window just outside culter but its cost prohibitive to bring it over farmers field

TR..out between Westhill and Alford. No mains gas.

Elec bill a bit over £200 a month. Everything in the house is elec. The log burner got installed last week so yet to get the benefits of foraged and properly dried wood.

Good luck foraging on any scale round here.... Unless your open to outright theft....

Land owners are pretty hot on it when they hear a saw going anywhere with good pickings of movable stuff and anywhere that is easy access by car has been picked bare....too many wood stove owners round here

Best bet is to ask the cutting crews when they are harvesting they normally willing to lay some shorties ( that no good for harvesting) asside for beer tokens for you.

[i]£200pcm[/i]

Makes our (oil-fired)AGA/wood-burner combo look cheap 🙂

Worth making sure you're fully insulated etc.

Some folks round hear cut down some decent sized softwood earlier in the year. Been offered a good pile of it in return for helping out with some stuff in return. However moisture meter says > 20% so needs to season longer.

Get a few contacts for wood at an ok price. Additionally would not trust myself with a Stihl or similar just yet..... 😕

Main advantage of the storage heaters is that if you have a dual rate electricity tariff they get "charged" overnight at the cheap rate. I think that Economy 10 package you mention above is one such dual rate. Our dual tariff is roughly 1/2 price off peak. So if you need to get most of your heating from electric (as we do) then it's cost effective. The main downside is they're not very controllable, although this isn't so much of an issue with newer ones.

Thermostat electric heaters for your main heating would be very pricey I think. I think you need to crunch some numbers on this. My suggestion would be storage heaters for the main rooms that you use often. They give a nice steady background heat at min cost. Put thermostat units in rooms you only use occasionally as they are cheaper to buy but cost more to run.

We get by alright with our storage heaters, combined with open fires and plug in electric heaters for very cold days. We don't have gas either. They're not the nightmare folk would lead you to believe.

I am guessing you have an electric immersion heater for your hot water and an electric shower?

Would be interesting to see how your bill drops in summer compared to winter to get an idea for your other electricity use but I imagine at least half of your bill is heating.

I would probably stick with the storage heaters over rads as you will be using electricity at a higher rate and electric heating is 100% efficient in terms of energy in to heat out so for 1kW of heat you are using 1kW of electricity. But storage heaters are harder to get right and you do waste some. At least with electric rads you can turn them on and off as and when you need to. Storage heaters need planning the day before.

Long term I would insulate and then look at oil or pellet.

would solar be an option to reduce your bill..... heat up the storage heaters during the day while your at work for use at night .....

would solar be an option to reduce your bill..... heat up the storage heaters during the day while your at work for use at night ..

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Any real life experiences? We both work pretty standard hours so not in the house most of the day.

My wife's lived in a number of places with storage heaters, almost universally they have been toasty at 10am when you're at work, and freezing by night time. Maybe the recent ones are better.

Long term id be looking to stick in an oil or space dependant pellet boiler....and wet radiator system.

That. But add coal to the list (trianco trg) - it usually works a fair amount less than oil to run.

We've got storage heaters at the moment. They're not as cheap as gas central heating but they're not bad.

We're on a 5+2 tariff where the heat up for 5 hours overnight and then for 2 hours in the afternoon which means the house is warm up until about 9 or 10pm at which point jumpers are needed. We've got about 350mm of insulation in the loft which makes a huge difference. Before that we were definitely cold through December and January.

Modern storage heaters have thermostats (ours are at least 20 years old and have them so not even that modern) so over Autumn we just set them to 5/10 which is based on a thermostat which measures the temp overnight (i.e. it's making an educated guess tonight how much heat will be required to reach 5/10 tomorrow night). And 'late' (so the baffle opens later in the day to release the heat) when we get home which is actually fairly pointless as the '2' hours is usually about that time so we usually just turn that down to open them manually when we get home (and close them again before bed). They're on 10/10 Christmas until mid February usually, as the input is automatic they never make the house too hot, you just start to notice that it's overly warm in the middle of the day.

The auto input also means it's pretty much like a timed central heating, they don't suddenly get super hot overnight, they just get warm enough to heat the house in the morning, then warm up again for the evening, it probably only takes <2hours to go from stone cold to full. If you've got them and you think you're wasting energy during the day, try and change your tariff, ours is no warmer in the day than it is at 8-9pm.

Electric rads are much much cheaper to buy, but will cost a lot (double the cost of storage heaters, less a bit as you can timer them to be off in the day/night when your out/asleep) to heat a house, the only place I've thought they were a good idea were in blocks of flats where the mass of the building acts as a storage heater and everything's insulated. We have a few rads in the un-used bedrooms and usually just have them on for 2 hours in the middle of the night just to dry out the rooms on the cheap tariff.

As above depends on long term plans..

Solar might be an option. Oil or LPG gas just as expensive as your current arrangement likely.
Small wind turbine ? 🙂

Some of those big space heaters might be more efficient (though noisy and obtrusive). Dyson possibly?

Think seriously about all the insulation (draught proofing) you can manage.

Much longer term - move, or knock down and rebuild 🙂

LPG gas more expensive.

Oil not so

electric 15p / KWH

oil currently 3.9p KWH

LPG 7p / KwH along with silly strict storage tank siting rules these days.

How ever instalation costs of a new system is prohibatively expensive hence why i suggested looking at solar - it doesnt need to cover all your heating just needs to suppliment it to reduce the costs significantly.

thinking - solar thermal array into a heat store and suppliment that with solar voltaic. - not sure wht current costs are but when i looked at it it was about double that of a full oil install - i didnt go down that route as i only had to fit a new boiler so significantly cheaper for the time being for me.

dependant on aspect and shelter - being a bungalow he should have the space for the arrays how ever knowing the area he lives in well its highely likely he could be in the shelter of a hill on the ideal aspect.

"Think seriously about all the insulation (draught proofing) you can manage."

best advice in this thread.

Think seriously about all the insulation (draught proofing) you can manage.

That works to an extent depending on the house. But you still need to let the damp air out somewhere. Our's is nicely insulated, which keeps 'good' (conducted/radiated) heat in, but we leave the bathroom window open to let the 'bad' (warm wet air) convent out.

Even better would be a heat exchanger extractor fan, but they're £££ and we're moving out.

you also find with a stove going tinas that it will dry your air our quicksmart anyway.

look at the new quantum storage heaters. i currently have ‘dumb’ storage heaters that are probably 25years old so they leak heat during the day when i’m out and you have to juggle the input to get the right amount of output and am always looking at the weather forecast before going to bed to see if i need to fiddle with the input to allow for temp drops/rises. the new quantum heaters are bette insulated and have a quiet fan and are thermostatically controlled and being ‘smart’ take the ambient temp into consideration plus they have ‘in all day’ or ‘out all day’ modes so they allow the temp to drop during the day but not too much then start to release heat so its warm when you return. they also have a holiday program so it’s warm when you return so no having to wait a day to charge up overnight.

triple glazing being fitted this month and then i aim to get 2 quantum storage heaters and just an oil filled timed radiator in the bedroom (dont like stuffy bedrooms). i dont think my bills will go down at all at £50-£60 a month in the winter but i expect to be draught free and comfortable for the same money.

i would imagine your bills to rise if you change from dual rate electricity and storage heaters to electric rads.

exactly the same for us as the OP and on THTC Scottish Hydro...
initally paying 60quid a month electric for small 2 bed bungalow for 2 people and that was really "looking after" electric usage....

so,
our meter box has actually 3 boxes/fuse sections -
THTC (controlled by Scottish Hydro)
24/7 off peak (as stated)
normal on peak (as stated)

first things first - ensure all your electric storage rads are connected to THTC fuses
hot water tank (and shower if you have one) are all connected to the 24/7 off peak fuses
your hot water tank is not on "always on" until it reaches a certain temperature. we added a timer control box (2nd hand off ebay) and programmed the hot water to come on at certain times we need it, or when we press a boost button which does it for 45mins.

then, we spoke to scottish hydro and said "were getting rid of electric heaters" they said *they* could replace them all and have them on 24/7 off peak.so, we declined,
but then bought some cheap 1000kw panel heaters off amazon with thermosstat AND timers to replace/complement storage - we "moved" these heaters onto the 24/7 off peak fuses.

installed electric shower on 24/7 off peak so not to heat up a massive hot water tank

installed oversized log burner and open all doors , installed overdoor vents -

because heaters are thermostatically controlled/on timers, they are not using electricity at all and our reminaing storage heater is off and not in "storage" mode to give out heat in the middle of the night when we dont need it.

monthly bills are now down to 42quid and we use shower/bath and heaters when we want to and not worry.

oh and get free cavity wall and free loft insulation asap.

electric 15p / KWH

oil currently 3.9p KWH

LPG 7p / KwH along with silly strict storage tank siting rules these days.

anthracite also about 4p kwh, no particular storage requirements

oil is particularly cheap right now, a couple of years back it was more like 6 kwh

YMMV, etc.

just for clarity my off peak electricity is 6.4p/kWh

An air/air heat pump if you want a quick, cheap fix that is more efficient than electric rads. A ground sourced heat pump if you are prepared to invest a significant sum and have enough land.

you also find with a stove going tinas that it will dry your air our quicksmart anyway.

One other thing to bear in mind with storage heaters, their input is based on the temperature the room reaches overnight. So if you top up the temperature with other heaters late at night you'll get into a vicious circle as the storage heaters think it's warmer, so don't heat up, so you put on more heaters, so the storage heaters heat up even less, etc etc. They also don't like being near each other, our kitchen and hallway ones are almost next to each other either side of the door, which means often one gets the heat from the other, thinks it's warm and stays cold.

GSHP shouldn't be too expensive if the land is available for a shallow trench, otherwise it's a 100m+ borehole and that's where it gets expensive. Still allegedly no more than that of getting a mains gas connection though.

"Yup, although all they're doing is acting like a huge extractor fan (but if you can get cheap wood then it's near enough free to run so the heat lost (youre drawing cold air in through an air brick, circulating it round the room, then heating it to 400C and ejecting it through the chimney) is irrelevant."

even paying for the wood still better than a storage heater.

dont mitsubishi do a smaller kw air-water heat pump that only does central heating and is a once piece unit....
i think its around 2grand + install (which could be straight forward) and of course factor in smoe cheap rads from Wickes and some plastic piping.

We ditched the storage heaters and THTC about 7 years ago. Went to economy 10, electric radiators with 24 hours timers and individual thermostats. Installed an unvented hot water cylinder with a time clock to take advantage of economy 10. We ran a two bedroom house mostly on the 10 hour cheap rate covering all electricity (heating, shower, hot water, lights, washing machine etc) for £50 per month.

otherwise it's a 100m+ borehole

Much less. It depends on the ground but 20m would be enough for a bungalow. I got a quote for my house which involved several holes in an inverted cone with holes only down to 15m.

When I finished insulating I realised it was unnecessary as the wood burner for a few hours in the evening is all that's needed. A single 1.5kw oil filled radiator is enough for the whole house if we don't light the wood burner. That's only happened once, just to see what happened.

Edit: I made a roof vent a few weeks back after the last thread of this type, Trailrat. 😉

Have a look at Quantum from Dimplex. I have them installed, absolutely brilliant. Each is thermostatically controlled but you can install a zone controller.

They are fairly low running costs on Economy 7, retain heat for well over 24 hours giving you heat on demand but generally are far more controllable than storage heaters of old.

We use them as main space heating with rads in the 2 x smaller bedrooms.

http://www.dimplex.co.uk/products/domestic_heating/installed_heating/quantum/index.htm

Do they leak much heat during the day?(the quantum) My old storage heaters are literally just a metal flap on a spring over the bricks so it's toasty warm all morning while I'm not in, was wondering how much the insulation had improved.