Storage heater wiring questions

tberry6686

Yep the convector part needs to be connected to the standard ring main that supplies your sockets.

Are the heaters on the standard ring main for the sockets ?.. easiest way to check is to turn off the ring main for the sockets and see if the heaters still work.

If so I would be inclined to get a different sparky in who has experience of storage heating to have a look as it sounds like your sparky has made a mess of installing these heaters.

MrBrindle

Just got home, I have checked the consumer unit and the good news (I think) is that each storage heater has a separate switch - not sure whats the correct technical terminology. Circuit Breaker I think. Does this mean it could be a simple task of taking out each storage heater from the consumer unit, and installing them in a new one, and connecting to the low tariff on the meter? And I'm guessing the convector part could be plugged into a socket which is right by each heater?

In all fairness he has been a fantastic electrician, did the rewire on the house for an amazing price (over £3000 cheaper than one quote), and has come out twice on short notice after I drilled into a wire and also to fix an issue with the consumer unit. So I would like to stick with him to solve the issue.

tberry6686

We have storage heating in our house with E7. all our power comes from the low tarrif when it switches on at night and goes to the daytime tarrif when it switches off in the morning. This is how it should be. If as you say yours does not do this then it is wired up incorrectly and will be more expensive to run.

It sounds like your electrician does not know how to wire up torage heaters correctly.. he may be cheap and reliable but, as a generalisation, cheap and reliable usually mean that they are not in demand.

farmerboy

Firstly not sure about the convection part as we don't have that on ours.

We had 5 storage heaters fitted when we had our house rewired 2 yrs ago. They are on their own ring and have their own consumer unit. The set up for our meter is that the power comes direct from that to the 3 seperate consumer units (1 for the storage heaters, 1 for the house and 1 for the outside farm). So that we could control when the heaters are charging we fitted a timer switch to the consumer unit for the heaters, we then set this as to when the come on and go off.

muckybutt

MrBrindle wrote: »

Just got home, I have checked the consumer unit and the good news (I think) is that each storage heater has a separate switch - not sure whats the correct technical terminology. Circuit Breaker I think. Does this mean it could be a simple task of taking out each storage heater from the consumer unit, and installing them in a new one, and connecting to the low tariff on the meter?

That would be the correct way to do it yes.

MrBrindle wrote: »

And I'm guessing the convector part could be plugged into a socket which is right by each heater?

You can do it that way, the proper way would have been to have had a switched fused spur (wired on the normal ring) next to the storage heater switch so you have local isolation over both of the circuits.

malc_b

MrBrindle wrote: »

Just got home, I have checked the consumer unit and the good news (I think) is that each storage heater has a separate switch - not sure whats the correct technical terminology. Circuit Breaker I think. Does this mean it could be a simple task of taking out each storage heater from the consumer unit, and installing them in a new one, and connecting to the low tariff on the meter? And I'm guessing the convector part could be plugged into a socket which is right by each heater?

If electric boards says you are on a radio clock what they mean is that a radio signal (LW I think) switches the supply so there is no local time clock.

It might be easier to find a split consumer unit with 2 inputs (if such exist) or two consumer units next to each other. The correct way to wire in E7 is with a contactor, a very heavy duty relay. The mains coming in is just the same. All that happens in E7 hours is that the meter switches rate. At night all electric is on cheap so you can can use time clocks to take advantage of that. But for the heaters rather than having a separate time clock for each heater (which you then have to set and keep in sync) the usual is to take a signal (i.e. a wire) same as switches the rate on the meter and use that to turn on all the E7 heaters. The signal wire isn't man enough to drive all the E7 heaters so you have a big relay (contactor) to switch all the heaters.

matelodave

As others have said, the storage heaters should have their own distribution board which would get switched on and off via a contactor controlled either by the E7 time switch or the electricity meter.

The heaters should have a separate spur to each heater from the consumer unit and a dedicated fuse for each heater. Likewise any immersion heater or fixed heating appliance should have its own dedicate feed and fuse They should not be part of the 13a ring main feeding your sockets as it's not designed to feed a load of several high current devices all at the same time and to service all your 13a sockets as well.

If your electrician has actually wired them as spurs then there might be a possibility of pulling the wiring out of the existing board and running it to a separate consumer unit

Otherwise your only real option is to fit time switches to each heater as muckybutt suggests and then make sure that they are timed to switch the heaters on during the cheap rate and off when it finishes - you would have to manually adjust the time on them in the case of a power cut or when the clocks change to make sure that they stayed in sync with the cheap rate otherwise you could find yourself paying full rate if you got an overlap.

MrBrindle

Thank you for all the advice so far. As thought each storage heater is on it's own circuit, but his solution is to install a small 'enclosure' next to the consumer unit and run the storage heaters off a timer in there. But it's not a digital timer, more like the type of timer you have on those panel heaters. He is charging us £240 to rectify the problem, which to be honest has p****ed us right off, as he should be doing it for free for botching it up in the first place. Needles to say, he'll be getting a stern reply.

We are still not happy with his solution and would rather it be done the correct way, by having them all on a separate consumer unit, wired directly into the economy 7 output - as many have suggested here and from what i've read on leccy forums.

An engineer from our supplier is coming out to view our setup on Friday anyway. Our digital meter is meant to have a clock built in, but it's wired into an old style economy 7 clock timer - probably 70s at least, so something is not right at that end either.

Do energy suppliers' engineers do domestic work for customers? I'm guessing the price won't be pretty though