£545 for electricity for 2 months - can this be right?!

parkerteb

If only I had know this before I bought the flat! the thing that confuses me is that those in the know say they are so expensive, yet if you google them or do any kind of research they are sold as a less expensive way of heating your home.
To be honest even when they are on they hardly heat the flat up as they are, I still have to wear several layers of extra clothing, but without them it will be even worse!
I can't imagine what a larger flat would do - this is only a one bed flat!
I'm going to call them again today and see if I can get any more sense out of them.
Is it going to be horribly expensive to replace my storage heaters? We don't have gas so it would have to be some sort of electric based heating.
It's also hard to know who to trust for this kind of thing - who do I call to come and take a look without being ripped off?

Katie-Kat-Kins

Right firstly don't panic about having storage heaters, they really aren't the spawn of the devil that some make them out to be.

When you think about the higher cost of electric heating, remember all the money you save on boiler servicing, and CO detectors etc! For a small well insulated flat the cost of running storage heaters compared to gas central heating in unlikely to be significantly higher.

The first thing to do is to get your tariff sorted. Npower are a bit special when it comes to talking to them on the phone, it took me about three calls to them to establish what tarriff I was actually on! I have storage heaters too.

You need to make sure that you are being billed on the right tarriff, an E7 tarriff will have a cheaper night rate and a higher day rate, rather than a standard tarriff that has just one rate for the whole 24 hours.

Do check your meter and keep regular readings, get into the habit of doing it weekly so you can track your usage, a site like imeasure can help.

Make sure that you only have two readings on your meter, often with storage heaters you will have more. We have 5 different rates........ this really confused Npower!

For your storage heaters, if you are warm enough at the moment and are leaving the output down low then turn your input down, and keep turning it down until they don't keep you warm enough so you know what level it needs to be set at. Having input high and output low is kind of like a car with the handbrake on and your foot to the accelerator floor! You should be opening the output when you are in the house and want warmth, the rest of the time it should be turned to minimum. The input, you leave at a fixed level once you have found a comfortable setting.

You will need to change the input setting as the weather improves, as storage heaters don't use a thermostat like central heating.

On the bright side come the end of March you will probably be able to turn off your storage heaters!

One final thing to check is that you are using the storage heater, and not a top up or boost facility as these can be costly to run.

parkerteb

That's a big help! Thank you - it's good to hear positive thought about these heaters!
I will call N Power again and find out exactly what is being charged for what.
One other quick question - do you know how I would find out how the storage heaters are actually charging at night - is it a standard timer or can I set the hours it starts to charge? Do N Power control that?
In typical sods law fashion - I got home to a council tax bill last night! Argh!