energy bills - a suggestion

xeny

Max68 said:

Just checked the pedestal fan is a 60 watt.  Running 24 hours a day probably used about two units of electricity according to my meter.  Obviously didn't cool the air but the breeze made it easier to sleep. So the question is can anything that gives out heat be economical like that?  Would an electric heater running hours at a time or an oil filled radiator be cheaper than heating the home with gas central heating?! 

heat is energy - it's rather different from the apparent cooling effect that a fan gives. The nearest to the something form nothing you're after is a heat pump, which can give out perhaps 3.5x the amount of heat that the electricity that powers it would generate in an ordinary electric heater. Read about conservation of energy to possibly get a better understanding.

Northern_Wanderer

QrizB said:

Northern_Wanderer said:

Yes I know, and they might be fine if you live in southern parts of the UK but in the much colder northern parts of the UK all your heat has run out by next afternoon/ evening and the house is cold.

That's only true if your storage heater is undersized (not helped if your property is underinsulated).

And that's the main challenge with swapping from THTC / E10 / Flexiheat or whatever to E7; you may find that the storage heaters currently fitted are too small to last the 17 hours during the day.

However, there's nothing that prevents correctly-sized storage heaters working in the Frozen North.

Thanks, I hadn't thought of it that way before, the unersized heaters. But increasing the size would presumably just increase the usage and cost even if it did keep the house warm? Glad I have got rid of them now, they were extortionate, but glad I still have all the wiring in case electric heating will be the way to go in future. 

QrizB

Northern_Wanderer said:

QrizB said:

Northern_Wanderer said:

Yes I know, and they might be fine if you live in southern parts of the UK but in the much colder northern parts of the UK all your heat has run out by next afternoon/ evening and the house is cold.

That's only true if your storage heater is undersized (not helped if your property is underinsulated).

And that's the main challenge with swapping from THTC / E10 / Flexiheat or whatever to E7; you may find that the storage heaters currently fitted are too small to last the 17 hours during the day.

However, there's nothing that prevents correctly-sized storage heaters working in the Frozen North.

Thanks, I hadn't thought of it that way before, the unersized heaters. But increasing the size would presumably just increase the usage and cost even if it did keep the house warm?

The total cost should remain the same if the cheap rate price per kWh remains the same.

The following example is simplified but should illustrate the situation.

Imagine you have a room with a daily heat requirement of 24kWh, used at a steady 1kW throughout the day, and have an E10-type tariff (timings taken from here) where you get cheap electricity for heat between 4am and 7am, 1pm to 4pm and 8pm to midnight. You would need to buy 24kWh to heat for the whole day but the biggest amount of energy you'd need to store is 6kWh, to fill in the 6 hour gap from 7am to 1pm.

Now imagine you switch to conventional E7 and get cheap electricity from midnight to 7am. You still only need to buy 24kWh of energy but you've now got to store 17kWh to get you from 7am to midnight; you need a storage heater that's almost 3x as big.