Fischer Storage Heaters

lstar337

I think that the most important message that we as responsible posters can give to somebody asking advice on a Fischer heater is this:

Yes they work, but no better than any other electrical heater. Therefore, if your Fischer 'quote' is higher than the cost a convector heater from any store (say £30), then the Fischer heater may not be the most economical solution for your needs.

If MSE feels the need to remove such advice, then I fail to see how it lives up to its own name. People come here to find money saving advice, I cannot imagine any situation where a Fischer heater would save anybody any money.

I am happy to be proved wrong by Fischer if they would like to come along and post and explanation of how their heaters work, but I am sure it is super secret.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Post.2. - Fischer - Efficiency

A question for the group - are Fischer [STRIKE]storage[/STRIKE] heaters 40%+ cheaper to run, compared to your existing night storage heaters, they claim here :

Our low input storage heaters can make a reduction of up to 40%+, compared to the old night storage heaters

Essentially Fischer are suggesting that if you use their heater you can get the same heat from their heater 40+% cheaper. So Fischer are paying up to 3 times the price for their electricity that the night store heater uses, and still they save 40+%. They don't tell you how they do this. No one including the ASA has seen comparative documentation that substantiated the claim that a 1.5 kW Fischer radiator could be used in the same circumstances as a 3.5 kW night storage heater and provide the same heat output or fulfil the same heating requirements, or that consumers would benefit from a saving of "up to 40%".

Having established Fischer's claim that their [STRIKE]storage[/STRIKE] radiators save up to 40%+, yet provide the same heat output or fulfil the same heating requirements compared to the old night storage heaters, can anyone [including Fischer] tell the group :

- how 24 hours at 12p per kW is 40%+ cheaper than 24 hours at 6p per kW ?
- how a Fischer radiator can provide the same heat output at 12p per kW as a night store heater at 6p per kW ?
- if all electric resistance elements are 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat ;
- then why are Fischer heaters 140% efficient at turning electricity into heat ?
- where does this efficiency gain of 40%+ come from ?

tilinglogistics

I have just read this lot from start to finish and I have to say being reasonably intelligent I am somewhat bewildered.

I was asked by my B-in-Law to look into these heaters for him. He was quoted a figure in excess of £3000 for 3 Units although there was no written quote and therefore he was totally unsure of what KW per unit he was getting.

I like, I am sure many others have, tried in vain to get this company to send me their pricelist. Naturally they wouldn't. So I tried a different tack and rang their office in Germany and told them I wanted to buy direct as they were for my holiday home in Spain. They referred me to the UK office and eventually they gave me a price of just over £5000 for 3 x 2.2KW Heaters. This I was informed was with a 20% summer discount.

Having the advantage of speaking German spurred me on to do some further investigation in the German market.

The end result being two different companies who claim to build heaters in Germany with exactly the same technology both offered to ship me to the UK their claimed equivalents with the same 2.2kw rating for an average price of around £400 per unit including shipping.

Make of this what you will and I hope it helps.

Kevin

Richie-from-the-Boro

tilinglogistics wrote: »

I have just read this lot from start to finish and I have to say being reasonably intelligent I am somewhat bewildered.

I was asked by my B-in-Law to look into these heaters for him. He was quoted a figure in excess of £3000 for 3 Units although there was no written quote and therefore he was totally unsure of what KW per unit he was getting.

I like, I am sure many others have, tried in vain to get this company to send me their pricelist. Naturally they wouldn't. So I tried a different tack and rang their office in Germany and told them I wanted to buy direct as they were for my holiday home in Spain. They referred me to the UK office and eventually they gave me a price of just over £5000 for 3 x 2.2KW Heaters. This I was informed was with a 20% summer discount.

Having the advantage of speaking German spurred me on to do some further investigation in the German market.

The end result being two different companies who claim to build heaters in Germany with exactly the same technology both offered to ship me to the UK their claimed equivalents with the same 2.2kw rating for an average price of around £400 per unit including shipping.

Make of this what you will and I hope it helps.

Kevin

Thanks Kevin

Post.3. - Fischer - The Controller

Most of their claims URL="http://asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2013/4/Fischer_Future-Heat-UK/SHP_ADJ_216000.aspx"]see here last Para section 3[/URL are only available when combined with their wireless controller - I have not in the last several years managed to get a handle on the costs [purchase & install] of this fundamental & essential pre-requirement. If anyone reading this, including Fischer cares to help the group by posting the figures of an actual installed working example, I'd be interested to see the cost of this controller, many other makers of similar products subject themselves to price scrutiny by publishing the prices of their wired and wireless control systems. In this case the costs of purchase & installation of their temperature control system would need to be added to the £5000 for 3 x 2.2KW Heaters. It's noteworthy that an unusually short offering of only a 2 year warranty on the electronics side of their product is available .. .. that from my point of view suggests they have no faith in the quality of their own chosen manufacturing components.

Cardew

It is a pity that MSE Andrea hasn't commented on the suggestion in post#130.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Cardew wrote: »

It is a pity that MSE Andrea hasn't commented on the suggestion in post#130.

- perhaps she is too busy or has been replaced by the MSE Investigator
- your even handed approach in #130 would have made many more money saving experts
- it, this very site, used to be a 'Consumers' Champions' site .. .. a leader amongst equals
- shame ....................................................... !
- have you noticed - no one speaks up for MSE as a consumer advocate anymore - has anyone noticed ?

wachdog

Hotspot44 wrote: »

Does anyone have any experience of Fischer Storage Heaters? (website is fischer-futureheat.co.uk/fischer-storage-heaters.php They claim these heaters are 40-50% cheaper to run than old night storage systems.

If its at all true, can Fischer please come on and back your claim to the saving. Hotspot and I are interested to hear you out. Give us some money saving advise.

wachdog

peacock17 wrote: »

I was only responding to the initial request on the thread, asking if anyone had experience of using Fischer heaters and as somebody who has used both old night storage in the past, which were not satisfactory and having changed to Fischer, found them to be very controllable and cheaper to run, just as they claim. Now this is my personal experience of actually using the heaters, have you used these heaters? I don't need any "evidence", the proof is in the great heating I've had for the past year.
By the way, the greatest advantage here is that when I'm not at home I'm actually able to turn my room thermostat down and therefore not waste energy. Something I could never do with an E7 old night storage heater. Surely saving energy and paying less is the way forward. That's energy efficiency.
Also may I add that the engineer who visited me was very informative and their selling methods were very acceptable. Again, I don't believe you have any experience of this either.

I do not believe peacock, so with winter round the corner will i be able to achieve the same results with say a £30-£50 heater from my local store. Do i have to send over a £1000 for a German storage heater or whatever brand it may be and if so can the boss at Fischer convince me here on this blog before I invite your sales chaps to my home. I need money saving advise. I am quite old and would not want to be forced to buy them without proper research. So please if you are for real let me hear you out.

DieselDragon

Hi all!
First post here, mainly to thank every non-biased human user for their input on this topic. I came across a brochure from one of these "Electric storage radiator" companies earlier on this afternoon (One guess which, though I mention no names for MSEs benefit) and thought it would be a useful thing to consider in heating my flat, but the facts given in this thread appear to add weight to my initial reservations about the company.

Just in case anyone's interested, there were a few alarm bells that struck me as I was reading the brochure which prompted me to research this in depth before contacting them:

• Absence of a price-list in the materials, especially when taking into account the justification for this given in the form letter that accompanies the brochure. If it's truly excellent value for money, then why not give me the prices right away?
• The URL of their website, which - To me - Looked more like that of an agent trying to masquerade as the manufacturer itself. Incidentally, a WHOIS look-up on the same domain¹ doesn't return details that I would expect to see from a regular and well regarded UK business.
• A Google search pulled up both this thread and ASA ruling A12-216000² against said company, which suggested that their products wern't necessarily as good as the materials attempt to make out.
• Finally: Has anyone else noticed the difference in registrant address for their domain and the address given in the ASA ruling? This sort of thing would make me think of a non-structured business operating out of personal premises and maybe a workshop unit tucked in the back of a hard-to-find industrial estate.

¹ - Use the WHOIS tools at nic.uk, or on any website that sells .uk internet domains.
² - See asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2013/4/Fischer_Future-Heat-UK/SHP_ADJ_216000.aspx

MSE_Andrea wrote: »

Hi everyone, to let you know, we’ve had to delete many comments from this thread...

Thanks for the explanation Andrea, but it has to be said that this has made the thread extremely fragmented and very difficult for guests and new users like myself to follow.
Could non-libellous summaries in place of deleted texts/posts be considered in future, please?

N.B: I've spent a fair bit of time ensuring that this post is readable meets all applicable standards and is entirely non-libellous, so no editing should be required on this post at least.

Cardew wrote: »

Without mentioning the names of any firm marketing electrical heating systems, it is apparent that MSE are having pressure applied to tone down or remove critical comments.
From scores of posts on MSE there is apocryphal evidence that potential customers are being quoted well in excess of £1000 each for a plug-in electrical heater; and indeed some have stated they have purchased at these prices.
color=#000088][i]Snipped for readability[/i][/color
Is it not possible that MSE could commission a report – a ‘layman’s guide’ to electrical heating? Any new poster on this subject could be pointed to that report. It would save MSE from having to remove text from posts that was potentially libellous and importantly save many people thousands of pounds.

Well, it'd be nice if said entities putting pressure on MSE would realise that user opinions do not constitute slander on MSEs part, and therefore any issue with a post should be a matter only between said entity and the user who originally made the offending post.

Besides: Is there not a statutory right regarding freedom of speech and opinion anyway? (Not that it would protect the user from prosecution and/or being sued for anything slanderous or libellous that they may publish under those rights...)

woodyrseelectrical

We find that Farho heaters are the best ones available as installers and users we monitor our installations using a monitoring system tl prove running costs per heater! But as has been said everything depends on getting the best deal from your energy supplier it is cheaper to heat hot water on off peak (E7) but then storage heaters generally arn't that efficient. Customers have to weigh up the cost of the heaters against running cost/energy savings we generally install lower powered heaters when compared with the likes of fischer, rointe, haverland and elnur.......