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Best way to heat water - Electricity or oil?
titus.a.duxarse
Posts: 11 Forumite
During the winter months we heat our water tank overnight with an immersion heater using “white meter” electricity, which is quite economical. Then during early evening the tank is reheated when our oil fired central heating comes on. Now that the warm weather has arrived, we no longer have our heating on during the evening, but we continue to re-heat the water using our oil fired boiler. One hour is usually enough.
The recent massive increase in oil prices had made me wonder if I am still doing the right thing by using our boiler to heat water on an evening, or would it be better to use our immersion heater, even if it means using “full price” electricity.
It is easy to monitor electricity usage and calculate the cost of heating water, but virtually impossible to do the same with oil. Please, can anyone advise me which method is the most economical?
T.A.D.
The recent massive increase in oil prices had made me wonder if I am still doing the right thing by using our boiler to heat water on an evening, or would it be better to use our immersion heater, even if it means using “full price” electricity.
It is easy to monitor electricity usage and calculate the cost of heating water, but virtually impossible to do the same with oil. Please, can anyone advise me which method is the most economical?
T.A.D.
0
Comments
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It all depends on the efficiency of your oil boiler. This can be as low as 50% for a very old boiler to 95% for a modern condensing boiler.
A litre of oil equates to approx 10kWh. So taking the price of a litre of oil at 55p this means the cost of producing a kWh will be between 11p(for 50%) and 6p(for 95%)
Full price Electricity is ??? 11p/kWh
So oil at current prices is cheaper in nearly every case.
However it probably won't make a huge difference either way.
Me - I would just shut off the oil boiler in the summer!!!0 -
The calculations seem to pan out like this for me;
oil = 10.27 kw hr per litre
My Trianco Eurostar 90 is 85.6% efficient (check http://www.sedbuk.com/cgi-local/dynamicv.cgi?page=boiler8).
At todays price of c55p I get 8.8kw/hr per litre i.e. 6.25p per kw
My current (ha, ha) electricity is 10.36p per kw, so oil is significantly cheaper compared to the day rate.
My available Economy 7 rate is 5.07p but you get caned for 12.2p for the rest of your electricity, so I personally do not see any savings there at all for water heating and indeed it would be much worse if you had to heat the water during the day for 12.2p per kw.0
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