EPC considerations for electrical and storage heaters

aweeks_2

I'd really appreciate any help with an EPC question.  Long story short, in the next couple of years I intend to sell my flat.

I am looking at making some improvements to increase the price and improving the EPC rating/modernising the heating made sense.  

Currently I have two old storage heaters (one in the hallway and one in the lounge) and two old electric radiators in the bedrooms.  I am considering updating the storage heaters to Smart High heat retention heaters that are a lot more efficient and easy to use.  Only my electrician told me that the lounge heater is very easy to replace, but the hallway only has night rate economy 7 power cabled and will cost more due to the re-wiring.

My question is, as we can easily heat the flat just from the lounge heater, is it worth changing the hallway heater?  I am not sure how the EPC is calculated if we were to replace the hallway heater with a standard electric radiator, rather than a smart storage heater?

Does anyone know how the EPC is calculated in this situation?

QrizB

aweeks_2 said:

Only my electrician told me that the lounge heater is very easy to replace, but the hallway only has night rate economy 7 power cabled and will cost more due to the re-wiring.

You need a better electrician.

Most smart HHR storage heaters can be powered by a single supply. Admittedly this needs to be a single permanently-live supply, not an E7 one, but unless there's something really odd about your flat that should be simple to achieve with a bit of reconfiguration of your consumer units.

My question is, as we can easily heat the flat just from the lounge heater, is it worth changing the hallway heater?  I am not sure how the EPC is calculated if we were to replace the hallway heater with a standard electric radiator, rather than a smart storage heater?

You'd need someone to do the heat loss calcs and see how big your lounge heater would need to be to make up for the loss of the hall heater.

EssexHebridean

When we had the Quantum fitted in the hallway of our flat the one it was replacing only had the E7-only wiring in place. It was a really simple job for our sparky to run the additional wiring as required and didn't add much at all to the job cost. (So yes, it did "cost more" but not a lot more).  I'd urge caution on the idea of connecting a programmable HHR storage heater to a single "always on" supply as it means far more user-input is required, and a far higher risk of things going wrong and the heater charging up on what is likely to now be a very painful daytime rate!

Can't help at all on the EPC question I'm afraid! 

matelodave

I dont even get a decent EPC rating for my bungalow with a HeatPump, not because it's not efficient but because it uses the most expensive fuel - electricity.

At present EPC's are sort of based on the cost of heating rather than ulimate efficiency of the heat source, so any electrical heating gives you a worse EPC rating than either gas or oil. Even the fact that my hot water comes from the heatpump gets marked down as "poor"

My EPC is based on the amount of heat required in kwh for heating and hot water (around 15,000kwh per annum) and not on the amount of energy it actually consumes (which is actually around 4500kwh per annum).