Potential Costs of Electric Heating

amiehall

I'm looking at potential flats to rent at the moment. I've just discovered a lot of the flats I'm looking at have electric heating. I'm wondering how worried I should be about this. Should I be considering paying extra to get gas heating? I've always had gas heating in the past and was wondering how electric heating costs would compare.

I'm careful with energy and am out a lot during the day so I'm worried something like a storage heater would use my money to heat the flat while I was out and run out of heat when I came home in the evening. This year I've been using my heating on average about 2 hours a day. Is electric heating likely to be more than double the cost of gas? I don't mind being frugal when it's a choice but if I physically can't afford heating when I want it I think it might be a different issue.

Sorry about the rambling... TLDR how much a month roughly would a winter electricity bill be in an all electric one bed flat?

HappyMJ

It costs around about £1 per night per storage heater to load it up with heat. So do some maths then add that figure onto your current electricity bill. That depends on so many factors it's hard to estimate accurately. Your heater could be smaller or larger or the heat might not be completely used before the next night or might be completely cold.

However, if you only use your heating for 2 hours per day it would be cheaper for you to use convector heaters which only cost 2 or 3 units per hour assuming your units cost about 12p that's a maximum of 36 pence per hour and 3 hours on maximum would cost about the same as a storage heater.

macman

Non-E7 electric heating is about 3.5 times that of gas per kWh. Though of course electric heating is more efficient.