Should I go gas or oil or stay with electric?

chrish12345

At the moment I have 4 economy7 heaters and a bottled gas fire in the living room.

I dont like the fact that they are on all day or off all day

I leave the boiler switched off as we have elecrtic shower and just boil the kettle once to wash up.

Would it be cost effective to switch to either oil or gas? There is no mains gas where I live so it would either be a big gas container or a oil one...

I Guess Pros of switching

- Adds value to the house
- Can control the temp easier

Cons
- High initial cost
- Boiler maintainence
- Oil and gas prices rising
- Boiler would have to stay on for the radiators

Any thoughts..?

Absinthe_2

I hated storage heaters when I had them. Found them horrendously expensive, and hated second-guessing whether to leave them on, or off.

Gas is much cheaper, and convenient for me. Easy to control, but I have an excellent Baxi combi, which is very economical to run. I had an external oil tank fueled central heating at one property. Not sure if that is what you refer to, probably not, but was horrendously expensive. Used to cost a fortune to get filled up, especially during the winter months. I would never willingly have again.

chrish12345

So is gas generally cheaper than oil?

macman

No, LPG is more than oil. Mains gas is much cheaper than oil.

anguk

If you haven't got mains gas I would be tempted to just fit good electric panel heaters in each room. Yes electric is more expensive than gas but your lpg/oil costs would be high because you're not on mains gas and you also have to factor in the installation costs, pipework, maintenance costs, repairs etc.

You can get very good panel heaters now with temperature control and timers built in, they're much better than storage heaters and there's no second guessing if you have to put them on or not. You would have the initial cost of buying the heaters but it would be much cheaper than installing central heating and there would be no maintenance costs.