Anyone used Rointe heaters?

molerat

An electric boiler is a system of last resort, it is never going to be economical.

Gas or oil would be the best option and add value / saleability to the property so don't write that one off, tanks can be hidden, but any new wet system is going to have a large capital cost and disruption during installation.

E7 may not be the best tariff for your current heating system as you could well be using the majority on the expensive day rate - what is the day / night split % ? Night storage heaters are the most economical way of using electric for heating - good old fashioned (but a bit nicer looking these days) heaters and not those fancy German ones that promise to save you a fortune ! https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3516223 - you don't need to read all 500+ posts to get the idea.

matelodave

Am electric combi will cost you even more to run than your present set up and will incur the same internal disruption as installing an oil or lpg system.

Do as Molerate suggests and do some comparisons by adding your day and night consumptions together to see if a single rate tariff might work out cheaper.

Although you are heating your hot water on E7, virtually everything else especially heating is coming from your peak rate which may be a lot more expensive than running the whole lot on a single rate.

We are all electric (but with a heatpump) so use most of our energy during the peak rate times and find that a good single rate tariff is cheaper than trying to optimise our consumption to maximise use of off peak electricity.

There's no way I'll persuade my wife that washing, ironing, cooking, vacuuming etc should be done between midnight and 7 am.

Cardew

Firstly I agree with the posts above that a electric boiler CH system is the worst of all options.

There is also no doubt that Night Storage heaters are the cheapest option for 'conventional'* electrical heating; but not everyone finds them convenient.

As you already have Rointe heaters I would think very carefully about removing them and replacing them with storage heating. This is simply because the capital costs involved will take many years to recoup in reduced running costs.

I would also look carefully at the need for you to be on an Economy 7 tariff. You pay extra for peak time electricity on an E7 tariff. Look at your annual total consumption of peak and off-peak electricity and compare that with a good 'normal' 24/7 tariff.

* If the layout of your house is suitable, it would be an idea to investigate the possibility of fitting an Air to Air Heat pump.(not to be confused with an expensive ASHP system which heats water) The Air to Air blows warm air to a room.

danwa9

Thanks to all of you for your incredibly helpful advice! It's made us change our minds about the electric boiler and we're now going to stick with what we have and look at what we can adapt.

Just moved to Ovo on an E7 tariff. The tariff is 15.36p for day usage and 7.21p for night usage. Called them now and was told that a year fixed rate would be 14.26p or a two year fixed would be 14.87p to be on a single tariff.

Looking at a rough estimate of our usage and these tariffs I think E7 is the better option by a couple of hundred pounds a year but I could be wrong.

The immersion tank obviously benefits the E7 tariff but the heating is of course our biggest issue. I guess if I have it timed to be on during some night hours (particularly early morning prior to getting up) then we'd gain something from E7 (same with timed washes for washing machine) but clearly we all use heating mostly during evenings. My wife is also on maternity leave from now until May so is likely to be at home a lot during winter months.

We do have a log burner but I'm under the impression that using that as a main source of heat for our lounge would still be rather costly (even when buying wood in bulk).

Based on those tariffs, do you think E7 would benefit or cost more? They said if changing from E7, they will fit a smart meter to replace and put us on a single tariff. Again, how useful are smart meters as haven't heard great things.

Again, honestly can't thank you enough for your advice!

And Matelodave, your final line had my wife and I laughing out loud!!

matelodave

I would have thought that if you've been there for 18 months then you'd have a pretty good idea of what your Peak v off peak usage should be especially if you've heed advice and been sending in monthly readings - it's worthwhile keeping your own spreadsheet as well.

So it shouldn't be difficult to add the peak and off peak readings together to get your total consumption and put it into a comparison site to see how much it would cost.

If I remember rightly, Rointe heaters have timers & thermostats so you should be able to programme them to optimise your heating in various rooms so they arent over heated and try to reduce the temps during the day when you are active and only heat them when needed. So a bit of tweaking could help.

As you say using as much off-peak leccy as you can by using timers on the washing machine, dryer or dishwasher would help and make sure you heat your hot water tank during off-peak times. I can't see a lot of benefit in overheating rooms overnight to get you started during the day although getting certain rooms up to temp during off-peak times might help.

The only way to see what is happening is to monitor your consumption fairly closely to see what effect any changes have.

I've been monitoring my energy consumption with an on-line monitor so I can see what is going on. See here http://www.energyhive.com/dashboard/dave

You can see that at this time of the year we are only using around 8-10kw/day of which under 2kw/h is for heating the water tank. So not including heating the house our average is around 4000kwh a year of which around 800kwh is for heating the water. We use about 3000kwh a year for heating, nearly all of which (say 2500kwh) is during peak times as we are at home all day.

so for us 7000kwh at your single rate would be around £1000 and on E7 would be about 5700kwh at peak and 1300 off peak = £960 so there's a bit of saving and we might be able to do better if we tried to do more during the night but as I said SWMBO won't play ball.

We are actually on 11.33p/kwh = £800 until our presen fix runs out

Don't forget our costs might look a bit strange but the heatpump runs nearly all day maintaining a background temperature and turns down overnight

danwa9

I'm having to go on a slight estimate at the moment as my wife has been on maternity leave and will be again during different times of the year. So even having been here for 18 months, I'm still not 100% certain of what we're using during an average year. Estimating based on current and previous circumstances has been my best option - leccy bills confirm this with varied monthly/yearly consumptions.

Really like the idea of plotting and checking energy use. Have you found the energyhive stuff useful? Has it changed your way of using energy?

The Rointe rads do have timers which are definitely useful in making sure they're heating up only when needed. It's just the rads themselves I'm not a big fan of. But you know what they say, you've got to make the best out of a bad situation.

matelodave

The energy monitor didn't really change our use of energy as we've always been a bit energy aware (or I have). I got the monitor when we refurbed our bungalow and installed the heatpump and heating system.

We had no prior info on the place which had eight rusty old night storage heaters and were ripped out within a day or so of us moving in.

The monitor did allow me to tweak the heating to get it running the way I wanted it and to set up all the room thermostats (we've got eight heating zones).
I also used a data logging temperature monitor as well - it took nearly all of the first winter to work out how best to set it up and to optimise it's operation.

It does show me what's on at any time and I can see when stuff is on that shouldn't be. We don't have the facility to turn stuff on & off remotely though.

Owain_Moneysaver

If you want wet central heating then you can get a thermal store which is heated on E7 overnight electricity at cheap rate.

They can be expensive to buy, bulky, and you have all the drawbacks of wet central heating (leaks, etc).

Jimbobmz

I just found this thread, so I joined MSE so I could post.
We took out our night storage heaters and the Economy 7, and put in Rointe heaters and switched to a Standard electricity tariff.
Our electricity bills have more than doubled.
I wish I had found this thread 15 months ago, it would have saved me a lot of money.
It cost us over £4k to put all the heaters in, and now our bills are huge.
I am posting this here so that other people can find it hopefully, and avoid making the same mistake that I did.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Jimbobmz wrote: »

I just found this thread, so I joined MSE so I could post.
We took out our night storage heaters and the Economy 7, and put in Rointe heaters and switched to a Standard electricity tariff.
Our electricity bills have more than doubled.
I wish I had found this thread 15 months ago, it would have saved me a lot of money.
It cost us over £4k to put all the heaters in, and now our bills are huge.
I am posting this here so that other people can find it hopefully, and avoid making the same mistake that I did.

Thanks for your input, sadly too late for yourself but a generous contribution like yours might well help others avoid an expensive mistake.