[TEXT DELETED BY FORUM TEAM] Economy Radiators

Dave_C_2

But surely all electric radiators are close to 100% efficient! As we all know any inefficiency turns up as heat (laws of thermodynamics). Even the losses due to resistance in the house wiring is turned eventually into heat.

There will be a slight loss due to IR radiation escaping through the windows.

The snag is that daytime electricity (not Economy 7) is so expensive.

Dave

HappyMJ

LittleVermin wrote: »

Interesting point that "this kind of product is sold all over the continent - mainly France and Spain".

They also suit the electric tariff in France. It's generated by cheap nuclear power stations making it cheaper than gas taking into account efficiency and servicing costs.

SunReader

The biggest heater they do is 1750 W, not really that good for a big room. Two heaters in a big room, plus a couple more on the same floor and that is just 29 amps loaded onto a 32 amp ring main capacity...then plug in all the other appliances and just hope that the breaker trips.

Using a permanently attached appliance plugged straight into the socket is a grey area, IIRC IEE wiring regs would state that the supply needs to be fused and with a switch on it; usually a fused connection unit would be used also freeing up the socket. Given that in a lot of houses some of the sockets will be spurs taken off the ring main, and even worse, spurs off a spur. Just one connector loose in a ring main and the safe capacity halves without even being noticeably defective.

knightstyle

We have these or very similar in the bed rooms and bathrooms in France where they are fitted on a separate circuit with a controller. Yes they are expensive to run but not if you turn their thermostat down. The main problem we had was that the central controller did not turn them off, it just reduced the thermostat setting by about 4 degrees C . I had two separate time clocks fitted, one for the bedrooms and one for the bathrooms.
As earlier stated seems expensive for what you get and the manufacturers leaflet implies that they should be on their own circuit, not a 13a socket.

tahrey

I'll be short and sweet for once, just quickly coming back to this

TimAllcot22 wrote: »

they work fantastically,

I'm sure they do, but...

if a little on the expensive side.

...they're being sold on the basis that they will save you money.

aliengfx

We bought 6 of the £300 economy radiators and half of them turned up faulty. We sent them back and they told us there was nothing wrong with them, but the replacements that they sent were also faulty. It turns out that the safety temperature switch is prone to failing as we've found out after having to fix them our selves because they won't accept that their product has a fault.

The cheapest way to heat your house is with air con units that work in reverse to heat as well, £400 for a Toshiba 3.5KW unit (1KW input).

bod1467

Interesting that there are so many MSE edits in this thread, AND an investigation? I guess the named company has lodged a complaint?

ThumbRemote

aliengfx wrote: »

The cheapest way to heat your house is with air con units that work in reverse to heat as well, £400 for a Toshiba 3.5KW unit (1KW input).

Really?

How do you cost that it's cheaper to heat a home using electricity raher than gas?

Richie-from-the-Boro

bod1467 wrote: »

Interesting that there are so many MSE edits in this thread, AND an investigation? I guess the named company has lodged a complaint?

- and a~n~other now

codger

Interesting website, what with its seeming commitment to providing the consumer with verifiably factual information. This revelation in particular came as quite a surprise:

Your electricity supplier could easily be charging you 30% too much for their electricity.

Ye Gods, it's bad enough that Scottish Power charges me a small fortune for my electricity, but to now discover that I'm being charged 30% too much for the electricity Scottish Power is using itself is plain outrageous. Considering how big an organisation Scottish Power is, it must use a helluva lot of electricity in its offices, and though I knew that this overhead is recovered from its customers, I didn't know that overhead was being over-stated by nearly a third.

This surely explains a great deal about why utility companies are making such vast fortunes, and I'm therefore very grateful for this information even though I'm wondering how this comparatively small energy specialist seems to know so much about the operational costs of giant utility providers. As to this:

We believe this applys to 60% of the UK Population.

Can this be true? Is it just a dreamt-up statistic? (Delete whichever is not applysable.)