E10 and Electric Heating

Jamie30x

I'm currently trying to figure out what the best route is with our Electric heating. We're in an all electric home, and I just stripped out our old Storage Heaters from 2008 at the weekend. These storage heaters appear to have had no thermostat in them, no automatic ability to heat the room to a set temperature, and all they did was take ridiculous amounts of electricity and release all their heat before it was needed in the evening. We've been using fan heaters for a large part of last year after finding out how inefficient the Storage Heaters were. The bedrooms all have panel heaters in them that I have retrofitted to be smart heaters, along with the fan heaters in the living room. I'm planning to switch to wall mounted panel heaters throughout the property where the Storage Heaters originally were, but just want to make sure I have everything right about our current tarriff etc and that I'm not going to have higher bills than I expect.

We're on a E10 with EON which gives us "cheap" electricity from 3.30am-6.30am, 1pm-4pm and 8.30pm-12.30pm. The problem is the cheap Electricty is 14p, and the expensive electricity is now 21p, which upon checking on uswitch we can get a single rate tariff with Symbio at just under 13p a unit. Is there anything I'm missing with switching to this single rate tariff, and outfitting the property with Smart panel heaters on the walls? As far as I can tell, we'll actually be better off on this single rate tariff than our current E10 tariff? We'd much prefer the instant heat option as it's much more suited to modern life, instead of storage heaters which you have to charge and then potentially use throughout the day, remembering to charge them, and open the slot etc (going by our old storage heaters anyway).

Jamie30x

Also, sorry I don't appear to be able to find the edit button for the original post, but I sahould also mention that our E10 has a nearly 25p standing charge, while the Symbio tariff has a 16p standing charge.

All of this seems to be pointing to the single rate tariff being much cheaper, but I feel like that's against everything everyone says about all electric homes.

Gerry1

No point in staying with E10 which is a twilight tariff dating from the 70s and intended for under dimensioned systems (underfloor and NSHs) when energy was hardly worth metering.  It will just become ever more uncompetitive and you'll find it increasingly difficult or impossible to switch suppliers.  It's 405-line Electricity ! (© Gerry1)

You'll probably be better off with high heat retention NSHs (such as Dimplex Quantum) on E7.  They can be programmed to minimise heat loss overnight and during the day if you're not there.  If you're at home during the day then on-demand electric heating will always be cripplingly expensive.

Theoretically it might be possible to alternate between E7 in the summer (night rate for the immersion heater) and  single rate in the winter (avoiding peak rate E7 for the panel heaters), but you'd have to watch out for exit fees and sudden increases with variable tariffs.

Make sure you read the Symbio thread before switching !

macman

To minimise the damage, yes, you now need to switch to a single rate tariff. But, even then, your bills are going to rise by 200 or 300% compared to a decent E7 tariff. Sounds like you failed to adjust the dampers in your old NSH's in order to reduce the output enough to retain sufficient heat for the evening. The old ones were not very controllable.
Too late now, but more modern NSH's would have been the economic way to proceed. Whatever you use as an alternative, the cost will be the same: high. All electric heaters are the same efficiency: 100%, just like your old ones.
In an all-electric home, dual rate, be it E7 or E10, is never going to be cheaper unless you have NSH's, as the bulk of your demand will be during peak rate hours

Jamie30x

macman said:

To minimise the damage, yes, you now need to switch to a single rate tariff. But, even then, your bills are going to rise by 200 or 300% compared to a decent E7 tariff. Sounds like you failed to adjust the dampers in your old NSH's in order to reduce the output enough to retain sufficient heat for the evening. The old ones were not very controllable.
Too late now, but more modern NSH's would have been the economic way to proceed. Whatever you use as an alternative, the cost will be the same: high. All electric heaters are the same efficiency: 100%, just like your old ones.
In an all-electric home, dual rate, be it E7 or E10, is never going to be cheaper unless you have NSH's, as the bulk of your demand will be during peak rate hours

Thanks for the reply (and to you too @Gerry1). No worries of our bills rising, as I said I haven't used the storage heaters in about 10 months after having a terrible time with them after we moved in. We've been instant heat (with cheap fan heaters in the living room/kitchen and the panel heaters in the bedrooms etc) ever since, and currently our electricity bill sits at £151 a month. Looking at the comparison website (though I've now noticed the Symbio thread on here too), our bill could be reduced to £101 using our actual usage over the last month. We're in a newer build which seems to be fairly well insulated, with triple glazing on the windows. I'll have a look at the newer NSH's and see if they're more controllable and compatible with modern life, and if they look good I'll look at a much more competitve E7, else I'll go the panel heaters route and a single rate tariff.

Gerry1

If you still have the NSHs, why not try running them on vaguely E7 hours (e.g. just switch off the afternoon boost), turn the output control right down before going to bed and then up if needed in the evening?  If successful then switch to an E7 tariff.  That might be good enough in the meantime, and you could consider Quantums if you're going to stay put for the foreseeable future.

It just seems a bit pointless to get rid of NSHs that may only need to be optimised (operating procedure and tariff) only to replace them with something shiny that turns out to be a lot more expensive.