Cheaper to heat a room with fan heater or whole house with gch?

BabyElephant

As per my other post we have bought (got free due to Tesco's Misprice policy :j ) a small fan heater to heat a small room for aabout 30-60 mins in the morning when it's really cold.

I was wondering does anybody know how I can work out if it is actually cheaper to do this or if it would be cheaper to heat the whole house with gas central heating?

We don't need to heat the whole house because we don't use most of it and our central heating won't just heat the rooms we need - it's all or nothing.

Thanks in advance for any help.

hopingforahouse

If you can see how many units your gas central heating would use in that time, and then see how many kWh's your heater uses, you can probably work it out from there. TBH though, its probably not far off each other in my experience.

Your gas bill should show you somewhere how to work out kWh from units on it. Then you need to work how how much you get charged for those kWh's and same for your heater (but in electric obv. It's a bit complicated.

Cardew

What sort of gas CH will only heat the whole house or nothing?

Norbert_Colon

Mine does by default. I have to adjust the individual radiators to control it room-by-room.

Cardew

Norbert_Colon wrote:

Mine does by default. I have to adjust the individual radiators to control it room-by-room.

Surely that is normal with most CH systems?

The OP said:

our central heating won't just heat the rooms we need - it's all or nothing.

space_rider

The fan heater will use 1 unit per kwh. It should tell you on the heater or on the box how many kwh it is. So if it says 1kw then it will use 1 unit per hour.

BabyElephant

thanks for the info - i will put on the CH and see how many units it uses and then convert it and compare it with the fan heater.

Cardew wrote:

What sort of gas CH will only heat the whole house or nothing?

sorry, should have clarified by what i mean by the whole house - all the radiators have to be on and at a certain temperature downstairs for the radiators to work upstairs. i have thermostatic valves on the upstairs ones so i can turn them off in the rooms we don't use upstairs but the whole of downstairs has to be on for any radiators to work upstairs

it's always been like this since we moved in - it was a newly built house - and our neighbours all work in the same way. we had an airflow heating system in the last house so i just assumed the way the GCH works in this house was normal - perhaps it isn't...

Cardew

BabyElephant wrote:

sorry, should have clarified by what i mean by the whole house - all the radiators have to be on and at a certain temperature downstairs for the radiators to work upstairs. i have thermostatic valves on the upstairs ones so i can turn them off in the rooms we don't use upstairs but the whole of downstairs has to be on for any radiators to work upstairs

it's always been like this since we moved in - it was a newly built house - and our neighbours all work in the same way. we had an airflow heating system in the last house so i just assumed the way the GCH works in this house was normal - perhaps it isn't...

That surely must be a faulty system(not balanced) or a design fault if neighbours work the same way.

How old are the houses? They should be under a garantee still.

With a properly designed system every radiator should work independently from each other, so I would try to get it sorted out.

BabyElephant

the house was completed in feb 2000 - i just assumed that it was the way they were supposed to work... i will look in to it - thanks for the advice