Alternative to underfloor heating

skbx90

Hi

I currently live with my partner and toddler in a rented flat with underfloor heating.

I have just had an electricity bill through for the past 6 months and it is over £600 which is very high considering I was paying £30 per month in my previous property and when I called up asking why it was so high they said that my underflood heating was costing £6 per hour per room which I used frequently used during the winter completely unaware of the bill I was running up!

I cannot afford this so am looking for an alternative, baring in mind I cannot install gas central heating!

I have looked at halogen heaters but they look as though they may burn my little boy it he were to bump into it

Help please!!

Cardew

skbx90 wrote: »

they said that my underflood heating was costing £6 per hour per room

£6 an hour would be roughly 60kWh - that is 60 1 bar electric fires.

If you were using 60kW per room you wouldn't need a cooker as you would just put the saucepans on the floor;)

The essential point to understand is that all electrical heating costs the same to run, in the sense that the amount of heat produced, for the equivalent running cost, is identical.

What we don't know of course is how effectively the underfloor heating has been installed.

However a £600 bill for all electricity(not just heating) for 6 months over the coldest winter in years is not high; probably well below average.

Pincher

If you paid £600 for November to April, in an all electric household,
it's nothing to complain about. Congratulations on having good insulation.

skbx90

Thanks for the replies, looks like electric costs more than i first thought!

nottseagull

skbx90 wrote: »

Thanks for the replies, looks like electric costs more than i first thought!

Are you running the heating at night, or before 08.30 summer/07.30 winter? If so, you need to switch to the Economy7 tariff which is a third of the price in exchange for a slightly higher daytime price.

jamesd

£600 over six months is an average of £0.139 per hour. About continuous use of 1kW. Or 2kW that if you were to use it only half of the day.

A desktop computer might use 0.1 to 0.5kW when it's on, depending on the model. A TV might use 0.05 to 0.1kW. A 60W light bulb would be 0.06kW while it's on.

Seems fairly likely that the heating was using about 1.5kW on average while it was on and other things were using the rest. 1kW = 1 unit = about 13p per hour depending on your electricity rate.

Getting one of the electricity monitors can help you to work out what's using how much power. E.On offers one that monitors it at the supply, so for the whole flat. Others are available for £20 or so that do it for individual items. So I know that my landlord's fridge averages 0.08kWh (700/year) and my main computer uses 256 kW when it's on.

Cardew

jamesd wrote: »

and my main computer uses 256 kW when it's on.

Wow!

That is an impressive computer!

Pincher

Well, he could have got a Cray XMP in a fire sale when Cray went bankrupt. I would buy it for the sofa. Unfortunately they probably all got melted down for the gold.

jamesd

I think that may have been a mere thousand times too high. What's the odd k between friends?

Not all of the Crays were melted down. The first one ever delivered is in the NSA's museum.