Cost of electric heating

paddypaws101

My friend and her OH are struggling to find a London rental flat that they can afford. She has just seen one that is less awful than the others....but there is no central heating.
What would her options be for economical electrical heating? Her dad is a builder so installation costs are not a factor.....just the efficiency and running costs of various options.

ed110220

There'll all be exactly the same for practical purposes as electrical resistance heating is essentially 100% efficient at converting electrical energy to heat energy.

That means there'll all cost the same to run, and electrical heating is expensive.

ed110220

I forgot to mention heat pumps, which use less electricity for the same amount of warming, but are probably not practical for a rented flat.

macman

You can't 'install' any fixed heating in a rented property without the LL's approval.
Surely the flat has some form of electric heating already in place?
The only 'economic' (i.e. less expensive) form of electric heating and DHW is NSH's and an immersion heater on an E7 meter. So you need to say what the current heating and metering arrangements are.

lstar337

macman wrote: »

You can't 'install' any fixed heating in a rented property without the LL's approval.
Surely the flat has some form of electric heating already in place?
The only 'economic' (i.e. less expensive) form of electric heating and DHW is NSH's and an immersion heater on an E7 meter. So you need to say what the current heating and metering arrangements are.

As above, the only form of electrical heating that offers any kind of benefit over another, is night storage on economy 7.

Night storage gets a lot of bad press, but if they are correctly sized, installed, and operated, they can save you a great deal of money.

I think you need to find out what kind of heating is already provided. If it is electrical heating on a flat rate tarif, you will either be spending a lot of money, or spending a lot of time cold, or even both!

Might be best to steer clear if that is the case.

macman

If there is no E7, and no heaters provided, then just buy the cheapest convectors you can find from Argos/Costco/Lidl etc for a few quid..
They'll be just as efficient (100%) as ones costing hundreds.

ed110220

As a very rough calculation, British Gas gives an average gas consumption of 16500 kWh/year. Assuming all is used for heating (most will be), at 4.5 p/kWh that will be £743 per year.

If you got that 16500 kWh from electricity at 15p/kWh you'd pay £2475 per year.

That's probably a little on the high side as a flat will take less heating than average, and even a modern and efficient boiler wastes a little heat in the vent gases, but it gives an idea.

I'd stay well clear of that flat.

lstar337

Just to add to the post above, we used 8172kWh to heat our 2 bed flat (4 night storage heaters) for May '12 - May '13.

@ 6.83p/kWh economy 7, it cost us £558.15 to heat the flat and hot water.

paddypaws101

Thanks for all the replies, I will pass the info on.
lstar337, that seems a really low cost over the year....do you keep your flat fairly warm with that usage?

lstar337

paddypaws101 wrote: »

Thanks for all the replies, I will pass the info on.
lstar337, that seems a really low cost over the year....do you keep your flat fairly warm with that usage?

I try to keep it around 20c-21c in the main living area.

It does seem low, but you have to remember that that is just our off peak usage. We used an additional 3075kWh of peak units at 18.03p/kWh (£562.73), so our complete energy bill was £1120.88 for the year, which I think puts us near the average dual fuel bill.

gazfocus

Have a look at electric radiators that are becoming more and more popular. We recently bought a stainless steel electric radiator from Geyser Radiators and we've been really happy with it. They also do some well priced, nice looking convector heaters that we've just ordered for our new conservatory.