Storage heating

smileytiger

SternMusik wrote: »

I am really looking forward to getting the keys to my own place tomorrow (which has gas central heating, obviously)

Good luck with the move:)

Phil3822

I have storage heaters in my 3 bed home. I find them fine to be honest. They are about 20 year old and heat the house fine. I have to pre plan a little and if the weather changes it's often to late but overall they are good for our family. My bills come in at £70 per month and everything in my house is electric. This is less than most peoples gas and elec bills in this size house. If given the choice at no cost or mess to me I would choose gas however these do the job.

jamie11

You might want to look at these http://www.economy-radiators.com

I'm buying some next month the price looks good.

savageHK

SternMusik wrote: »

they run out of heat at the end of the day, so that when you come back home in the evening you have to switch on extra heaters, at daytime electricity rates.

Also there is no way to turn them down if you left them on too high a setting but the day turns out to be quite warm - they will just chuck out the heat regardless.

Rooms that don't have storage heaters in them (such as bathrooms, kitchens and sometimes bedrooms) have to be heated with convection heaters, again at expensive daytime rates.

When you return from a holiday during the winter the place is likely to be freezing (unless you want to keep them on a high setting while you are away), and there is no way to get it warm until the next day. (There will be no hot water either.)

I'm not sure what type of heaters you've had but the ones we've used have had output control so while you're at work you could leave the output on minimum and then turn it up when you come home. That also handles the problem if the day turns out warmer than expected, just turn down the heat. Ours also had manual override in the same heater so if you did run out and needed more heat (or arrived home post-holiday) you could turn on the electricity and the heater would warm up again (admittedly on non-economy-7 tariff, but hey ho).

As for the hot water I agree with a later post - that's normally on a different circuit and our hot water override was only about 20 mins or so and in that time there is enough hot water to have a shower or similar - I'm not sure how it works at all though, clearly it doesn't heat the whole tank up so either there is a mini-tank or something sensible inside the tank which seperates out hot water from cold.

We had 2x storage heaters in our lounge/dining room area, another in the passage (of all places), a non-storage heater in both bedrooms and a fan heater in the main bathroom - but only ever had one of the ones in the lounge on, and if I was studying all day in the 2nd bedroom I had to turn on the non-storage heater in there. I don't understand why people feel the need to heat their entire house to c. 22 degrees year round, if you're in bed you should be covered by a nice warm duvet! Similarly if you're in the bathroom you're normally in the shower or bath, both of which are hopefully warm places to be

mimimt

I found storage heaters completely fine. I live in a one bed flat which has three storage heaters installed, but I only ever use the one in the living room as that's enough for the entire flat. I only wear T-shirts at home in case you wonder about the temperature. I also have a storage boiler which is on automatically at Economy tariff - I never switch it off as I hate not having hot water all the time. My electricity bill comes at £50 per month in the winter and £30 per month the rest of the year, which is comparable to similar places with GCH.

That said, I do have a good Electricity Tariff which is no longer available. My Economy 9 tariff includes two hours during lunch time which I guess really helps keeping the place warm throughout the day.