Replacing one storage heater with alternative heating

Auditor69

We use storage heaters for our home heating.
The large storage heater in our living room needs replacing.
What alternatives are available?
Room size 20 square metres 

Robin9

What's wrong with  it ?   Does it work or simply not look pretty.  

Wall mounted convector from Argos is cheap but will be more expensive to run - may also need alterations to your wiring.

Be wary of magic dust heaters.

matelodave

There really sin't much to go wrong in an old storage heater, so it should be easy and not to expensive to repair. More modern storage heaters are quite expensive to buy and as the've got more complexity (electronic thermostats and fans etc) might be less reliable.

As Robin says a convector, panel heater or oil fill radiator will cost ypou a lot more to run as they use peak rate leccy when in use. BEWARE of Fischer, Rointe and other so called "efficient" heaters filled with magic dust, goldern clay or mermaid's oil etc.
 They are not storage heaters and will cost just the same to run as a cheapie from Argos or B&Q

Gerry1

A new high heat retention storage heater is likely to be more efficient than a very old one because it won't waste so much energy overnight when it's not needed.  It'll also have more bells and whistles, e.g. being programmable so that if you go away you can tell it to warm up before your return.

Ideally it will also need a 24 hour supply so that you can top up (but at expensive daytime rates) if there's an unexpected cold snap or you've messed up.

It'll probably look nicer, but it's likely to be a bit of a vanity project because any 'all singing all dancing' replacement will probably take a long time to repay the capital investment.  If necessary, a cheap and simple repair of the existing NSH is probably the money saving answer.

QrizB

I could be provocative and suggest an air-air heat pump (AAHP). It's what I would consider if I had E7 heating.

It's potentially cheaper to run and would give you the option of air conditioning in the event of a summer heatwave.

Does your living room have an outside wall to the rear or side of your house?

Swipe

QrizB said:

I could be provocative and suggest an air-air heat pump (AAHP). It's what I would consider if I had E7 heating.

Having used aircon for heating in my previous house for the last decade, I wouldn't want to be running an air to air heat pump on expensive E7 day rates. My previous house single rate was 10.7p with Symbio but now with EDF at the new place the peak rate is 21p and 8.8p off peak. In the depths of winter a heat pump is going to be drawing 700W - 1KW constantly and you are also looking at approx £1200 for purchase and installation.

Reed_Richards

Swipe said:
...In the depths of winter a heat pump is going to be drawing 700W - 1KW constantly and you are also looking at approx £1200 for purchase and installation.

Really?  With air-to-air I would imagine you could get a CoP of at least 3 even in the depths of winter which means 700 W - 1 kW constantly would give you at least 2.1 kW to 3 KW of heat, constantly.  To get the equivalent of a constant 3 kW of heat from a storage heater you would need to charge it for 8 hours at 9 kW.  AFAIK that is vastly greater than any domestic storage heater can take  

Swipe

Reed_Richards said:

Swipe said:
...In the depths of winter a heat pump is going to be drawing 700W - 1KW constantly and you are also looking at approx £1200 for purchase and installation.

Really?  With air-to-air I would imagine you could get a CoP of at least 3 even in the depths of winter which means 700 W - 1 kW constantly would give you at least 2.1 kW to 3 KW of heat, constantly.  To get the equivalent of a constant 3 kW of heat from a storage heater you would need to charge it for 8 hours at 9 kW.  AFAIK that is vastly greater than any domestic storage heater can take  

It depends how old your units are. On my 12 year old Daikins, l'd get a CoP of 3 at around 7C and up to 4 about 13C. In the depths of winter my CoP was consistently less than 2, and even less when it sleeted, snowed or was freezing fog when they would defrost cycle every hour.

Reed_Richards

Thanks for that clarification @Swipe .  I had a look at a Daikin brochure for a randomly chosen unit.  The 3.5 kW model claims to have a Seasonal Coefficient of Performance of 5.9.  This falls to 5.5 for the 5.6 kW version.  SCoP is an average figure so the actual CoP in the coldest weather will necessarily be worse than this average.

QrizB

Swipe said:

QrizB said:

I could be provocative and suggest an air-air heat pump (AAHP). It's what I would consider if I had E7 heating.

Having used aircon for heating in my previous house for the last decade, I wouldn't want to be running an air to air heat pump on expensive E7 day rates. My previous house single rate was 10.7p with Symbio but now with EDF at the new place the peak rate is 21p and 8.8p off peak. In the depths of winter a heat pump is going to be drawing 700W - 1KW constantly and you are also looking at approx £1200 for purchase and installation.

The OP was asking for alternatives and I did say I was being provocative!

With a COP of 3 you're still better off spending 21p on a kWe (7p per kWt) vs. 8.8p, and if a modern system has a SCoP of 5+ the average over the winter should be much better than 3.