Has anyone used electric heaters ?

Susan1942

Sorry should have ready there was a tariff for over 60's.  I read that tthey don't work cost out based on what a person uses but rather what a similar home in the same area uses. That is how I understood it.

MWT

Susan1942 said:

I've just checked my account and I am paying £118 a month and I have £461 in credit

I am on a variable tariff with Octopus 
Sorry about that 
Sue 

It looks like you are in a good place coming into the winter months with a good amount of credit in your account.

You are with Octopus which is a great place to given the uncertain future for so many other companies.

Just stay as you are right now and make sure you stay in credit as the bills go up over the next few months.

Sounds like you are managing your heating requirements very well and I wouldn't change anything at all in what you are doing.

Susan1942

Thank you. I do manage pretty well.  Something I do in winter and as I live alone I will get ready for bed and put a cosy dressing gown on.  But it is what it is this year and we will just have to pay what is necessary.

wittynamegoeshere

Susan1942 said:

I am just checking my bill now.  I know that 75-80% of my electricity is on economy 7 
Night is 10. 80p  and day is 17.74p  so it is worth it for me.  We have a laundry so I don't have the cost of washing or tumble drying clothes.   Thinking back to when I was 60 and at that time I can't remember now what it was called.  I was with them I think for 2 years and I leftt when the payment went up to £100. I then switched several time over the past 18 years and only in the  past couple of years I have reached £100 + .  Last year I got a refund of I think over £300 from Octopus.  I am retired and live alone so really need my heating to be on.  For now I am using my electric blanket but the bedroom heater will need to go on soon.
Sue  

That's a really good tariff, at that price difference it's definitely worth shifting consumption to the off-peak times.

When I did all the sums a couple of years ago I concluded that it wasn't worth it, as the off-peak was not much less than the daytime rate.

It will be used less efficiently if it's being used for heating, and in the past the daytime rate was higher too, so I concluded that the negatives outweighed the positives.

I was paying 13p/unit at all times until last month - not much more than your night rate.

But you are paying less for your daytime rate than the 21p I'm now paying at all times after my supplier went bust and I got moved to the maximum tariff, along with more and more others.

wittynamegoeshere

QrizB said:

wittynamegoeshere said:

When I looked into storage heaters I concluded that, based on the typical tariffs at the time, they weren't worth bothering with.

You get power at a lower rate but inevitably waste some, as they will always emit some of the heat when it's not needed.

My strategy is to use a lower amount of more expensive energy, by only heating when I'm actually there.

That's a moderately expensive gamble, and contrary to most people's experience. I've not had an electrically-heated house for almost two decades but, checking my records, between August 1999 and August 2000 I used a total of 8682kWh, 1363kWh peak rate and 7319kWh off-peak.

If I used that much electricity today, on "Flexible Octopus October 2021 v2", the cost would be ~£1400 if E7 or ~£1800 if single-rate.

Of course you might be an exception and I guess you'll find out in due course!

My point is that you'd be using less than those 7319 units if you were using them on-demand only when you wanted heat.

Storage heaters, however good they are, lose a significant amount of heat when the room doesn't need heating.  The same is true for hot water cylinders.  Also you need to constantly predict the need for the next day, some people end up opening the windows if the weather is mild, because the heaters are spewing out heat that was created from electricity consumed the previous night.

It's a false comparison to simply compare the price you paid with the same number of units at a standard rate, as you wouldn't have wasted as much.

I'd guess that you probably were better off on E7, but that would depend on the tariffs and the amount of extra power you consumed as a result of storing the heat inefficiently.

tux900

wittynamegoeshere said:

[...] a heater is inductive so has a very high inrush current.

An electric convector heater would be purely resistive. 

Swipe

wittynamegoeshere said:

QrizB said:

wittynamegoeshere said:

When I looked into storage heaters I concluded that, based on the typical tariffs at the time, they weren't worth bothering with.

You get power at a lower rate but inevitably waste some, as they will always emit some of the heat when it's not needed.

My strategy is to use a lower amount of more expensive energy, by only heating when I'm actually there.

That's a moderately expensive gamble, and contrary to most people's experience. I've not had an electrically-heated house for almost two decades but, checking my records, between August 1999 and August 2000 I used a total of 8682kWh, 1363kWh peak rate and 7319kWh off-peak.

If I used that much electricity today, on "Flexible Octopus October 2021 v2", the cost would be ~£1400 if E7 or ~£1800 if single-rate.

Of course you might be an exception and I guess you'll find out in due course!

Storage heaters, however good they are, lose a significant amount of heat when the room doesn't need heating.  

But if you are home all day like myself and Susan are then the rooms do need heating. On colder spells if I find myself running out of heat late at night I simply go to bed much earlier and get up a few hours earlier to make the most of the heat.

gefnew

This may help.

Resistive Loads

Loads consisting of any heating element are classified as resistive loads. These include incandescent lights, toasters, ovens, space heaters and coffee makers. A load that draws current in a sinusoidal waxing-and-waning pattern in concert with a sinusoidal variation in voltage – that is, the maximum, minimum and zero points of the voltage and current values over time line up – is a purely resistive one and includes no other elements.

Inductive Loads

Loads that power electrical motors are inductive loads. These are found in a variety of household items and devices with moving parts, including fans, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines and the compressors in refrigerators and air conditioners. In contrast to resistive loads, in a purely inductive load, current follows a sinusoidal pattern that peaks after the voltage sine wave peaks, so the maximum, minimum and zero points are out of phase.

Cheers

wittynamegoeshere

tux900 said:

wittynamegoeshere said:

[...] a heater is inductive so has a very high inrush current.

An electric convector heater would be purely resistive. 

Apologies and thanks, you're correct.  I got misled by them being coiled, but of course they use resistance wire so the inductance is far less signficant than the resistance.

I still wouldn't plug one into a plug-in timer though.  I wouldn't want a freestanding heater to be on unattended and wouldn't trust the typical cost-reduced timer to be capable of withstanding this sort of current for a sustained time.

I had a rented flat once, when I tried to unplug the kettle it had welded itself into the socket.  This was a BS-marked socket and kettle, and was only ever on for as long as it took to make a single cup of tea.  High current can do a lot of damage and can easily make things catch fire.

ballisticbrian

I'm all for a *mixed* approach. We have some oil filled radiators in different rooms and it worked out from the British Gas energy monitor contraption that we could run 2 and a half of those for the same price as running the gas boiler. (but bear in mind they come in differing wattages). So this was useful to know if there's just one of you in the house, or you are not in for long, or if it's October / May and you don't need much heat.