general advise please!

laured

Hi All

i currently live in rented a 2 bedroom flat that runs on e7 electric only. I decided when moving in to not heat the water via the eletric boiler but to instead heat the kettle when needing to wash the dishes and use the electric shower for a shower. Would anyone know if this is causing my eletricty bill to be really expensive?

I also have storage heaters which make my electricity bills in the winter extremly high. I have read in presvious forums here that s.heaters heat up overnight - does anyone know if this is automatically set?

Thanks for your help

spiro

You will have a 2-rate (E7) meter and the storeage heaters will cut in when the 2nd rate (night) is active. They build up heat while the power is on and then slowly emit after the power is switched off. As you say not the cheapest way to heat the place.

Magentasue

Are you using your heaters now? If not, take daily/weekly readings and post them here - people will tell you if they seem average or high.

All things being equal, if you need very little hot water (couple of washing up bowls), I would have thought a kettle was less expensive than using the immersion heater. Remember, though, your immersion heater can be set to take advantage of cheaper night time rates so, maybe 20-30 minutes of that would be more cost effective than kettles? Bit of meter watching would tell you.

From memory, I think it costs me about 2p to boil the kettle (single rate).

Premier_2

The electric shower is probably the most expensive single appliance you have to run. Even the smallest ones are rated about 7kW, but they are often rated about 9kW or even 11kW.
Depending on how long you take to shower, this could be the main culprit to your high electricity bill. (other than the storage heaters)

Thats greater than an electic oven and four rings on at full blast or any single storage heater.

By comparison, an immersion heater would be 3kW and a kettle typically 2.2kW (although some of the 'fast boil' ones are 3kW too)

Francesanne

laured wrote: »

Hi All

i currently live in rented a 2 bedroom flat that runs on e7 electric only. I decided when moving in to not heat the water via the eletric boiler but to instead heat the kettle when needing to wash the dishes and use the electric shower for a shower. Would anyone know if this is causing my eletricty bill to be really expensive?

I also have storage heaters which make my electricity bills in the winter extremly high. I have read in presvious forums here that s.heaters heat up overnight - does anyone know if this is automatically set?

Thanks for your help

We also have e7, storage heaters and an immersion heater we have a timer on the immersion heater so that comes on during the night for roughly an hour and that supplies enough hot water for 2 power showers a day and all my hot water for that day. Storage heaters are expensive to run but I find them pretty efficient heatwise. I don't like a hot bedroom so never tend to use that one even when it's really cold.

Lacrimosa

I've lived in a small flat with Economy 7 these last fourteen years. I've got just one storage heater which heats up automatically overnight (so long as it's switched on at the wall) using the cheaper night-time tariff. For me, just one heater is generally enough to heat the whole flat.

What I most dislike about it is this... the heater is always at its hottest in the wee small hours, when it's freshly heated up. Sleeping as I do with the window open (I'd boil alive otherwise), all that expensive heat goes straight out the window. Then it gradually cools down during at the day (when I'm at work) before becoming distinctly chilly in the evening (when I'm at home). As such, I can't recommend it!

And yes, it does have an open/close vent on it, but it doesn't seem to make much difference, given that the whole unit heats up - not just the elements inside.

The daytime tariff for E7 electricity is usually at least twice the price of the night-time tariff. Depending on your lifestyle, and when you're at home, you may find it cheaper to do as you're currently doing with your hot water - just switch it on as and when you need it during the day. (That's assuming your storage heaters, like mine, can be manually switched on to heat up during the day.) Given the rising cost of electricity, I'm going to try this approach myself this winter!