Moving to all electric house - best options?

rufus430

I'm buying a house & the only energy connected to the property is electricity.
It needs a fair bit of work all round, so within reason, I'm pretty much viewing any initial outlay to get it as I need it as part of the purchase price - (since a home with everything sorted would cost me significantly more anyway).
I'm trying to work out my best option to cover heating, hot water & cooking.
Currently, it has some pretty old & bulky night storage heaters, some of which look they may need replacing simply for safety reasons and a hot water cylinder. There is currently no boiler.

Mains gas is not an option due to the long distance from the nearest main.
We're mainly in evenings & weekends.
Do I simply stay as is, replacing what is not safe? Is it worth updating to modern night storage heaters, (more control/better insulation to retain heat till wanted?) or is there no real difference?
I was thinking of having an electric boiler & wet heating system, but I've read that this is a poor choice cost-wise.
I wondered about economy 10 rather than 7 as it feels like that would give me a bit more flexibility to get washing etc done, and to give the storage heaters a little boost in time for the evening when we'd mostly want them, but it seems to get a bad write-up?
My heads spinning a bit & it would be great to get some input.
Possibly worth mentioning, I need to move the cylinder to a new location anyway.
Many thanks in advance

Robin9

I don't think E10 is available to new customers.

Forget electrically heated hot water and conventional radiators - probably the most expensive form of heating known to man.

Forget the modern slim radiators filled with "magic dust" - expensive to install and even more expensive to run.

Not sure what you mean by "unsafe to run". Unless the sockets and the short length of wiring is damaged or they are falling off the wall.

My suggestion would be to live with them for a year, get to know how they work. If any are not working at all it may be that an internal thermal link has operated or a fuse has blown.

rufus430

Thanks for the reply. I was going to post a pic of the switches of one, but it won't let newbiies post links which seems to be the way photos are added. I haven't looked at all of them, but at least one has extensive brown /rust coloured marks both around the switch and on the underside of the cover, which looks like it may be due to an electrical short or something.
There do seem to be a couple of suppliers out there providing economy 10 - but I may have misunderstood the availability though.

jk0

Another vote for leaving things alone. Replace the burnt switch if you want, but I bet the heater is still okay.

matelodave

We had a similar situation 10 years ago - all electric bungalow, needing lots of work and manky old storage heaters.

I opted for an air source heatpump coupled to an overlay wet underfloor heating system. Yes it was expensive but over the years it costs me less than £500 a year for heat and hot water and I'll get £5000 back from renewable heat incentive payments. It's worth considering but make sure that you research it very carefully.They need to be correctly specified, properly configured and most of all properly operated. We run ours on a the cheapest single rate tariff we can find.

Storage heaters do do the job provided that they are sized and operated correctly. E10 tends to be more expensive than E7, especially for the peak rates, so check tariffs very carefully. WE pulled ours out as we have a completely empty place to work on and several floors had to be replaced (we lived in our caravan on the drive for the duration of the work)

As Robin says, avoid an electric wet system like the plague followed very closely by Roint or Fischer type electric radiators filled with fairy dust or golden oil. They are extremely expensive to install and run. They are mis-described as storage heaters. They aren't and cannot take advantage of storing off peak energy like a proper storage heater.

jk0

One thing I often do between tenants is completely take the storage heaters apart and put all the metal panels to soak in the bath. They come up beautifully.