Overpriced ?

janny2107

moved into a listed building flat which has wet electric central heating .
Bills are ridiculous with heating costing approx £2.00 per hour 
I’ve always had gas before so wonder if this is normal price ?
electricity provider say I’m on the cheapest tariff  

emmajones1976

Pre payment meter?

QrizB

£2/hr is about 10kW. Assuming a reasonably large flat that's not unreasonable for the first hour or two but once the flat is up to temperature it should drop back to less than half that.

Yes wet electric heating is expensive, probably the most expensive mainstream option.

jbuchanangb

Hopefully you have done the obvious thing of taking the meter reading when you moved in and opened an account with the incumbent energy supplier.

Wet electric heating is the most expensive sort. You need to closely scrutinise all the controls available to you, such as timers and thermostats in order to tune the system to the bare minimum requirements. If no-one is home all day, decide whether you need the heating on in the morning, or only in the afternoon and evening, and set controls accordingly. If some rooms are not used most of the time, close the door and the radiator valve for those rooms. Read your meter every day for a week to get a good grasp of what's going on. Several years ago my daughter had a draughty cottage with wet electric heating, and by judicious use of the controls she managed to use much less electricity than the previous tenant! (according to the landlord)

janny2107

Thanks for your replies , Looks like iit’s just an expensive form of heating !
I am retired and not sure about investing in a gas boiler ,at the moment I only heat my living room with open plan kitchen but do have high ceilings ,it’s nice and warm  when the heating is on but at £2.20 per hour ( checked it with doing meter readings ) I can only have on a couple of hours a day ☹️

markin

A Split aircon/heatpump, Air to Air unit would be around 3x cheaper to run, but getting worse as it gets closer to -6C, cost around 3K installed.

Definitely get a price on installing Gas even if its just for a Gas fireplace rather than central heating.