Electric heating or Oil?

grazb75

I have just had to pay 49.95p per litre for 500 litres of oil. After picking myself up off the floor and having a stiff drink, I got to thinking.

Considering the current prices, would it be cheaper to run electric storage radiators?

Has anyone compared the current costs per kilowatt or is there a website comparison whatsit somewhere?

Thanks
Graz

owned_by_2_Siamese

The key to this is the cost per kilowatt of heat you get from your oil - then the you can work out the price - which you can then compare to the quoted tarrif from your electric company - then you can compare like with like!

Generally 500 litres will be an expensive way to buy oil - it ususally works out cheaper at 1000 litres plus so if you have a big enough tank it could be as much as 2p a litre cheaper!

Remember that you need to look at the cost of buying and installing the storage heaters - then there is the convenience (inconvenience!) of their use by design - great in the morning useless in the evening - when you need heat - so you tend to use peak rate (and the peak rate is ofter higher cost than normal if you are on an economy 7 tarrif!)

At the moment for me its 4p a KW for the oil and 8p for electric (single standard rate) - might be less on E7. When you look at the installation costs etc - then I think oil still works out cheaper in the short/medium term.

Might be worth thinking about your boiler - a new condensing boiler could be as much as 94% efficient versus a five year old boiler at perhaps 60% meaning you get more heat per litre!

Anyway here is a way of working out a comparison cost for your oil:

hi - here's a way to work out how much your boiler costs per kilowatt (so you can compare it to electric where the price is allways given it kilowats. I make no promises about its accuracy/validity! It will only tell you the cost of your boilers output -

You can get your boilers efficincy by searching for SEDBUK on the net. If its not condensing and its more than three years old - I'd 'guess' at 70%

Hope it helps!

You can get the efficiency rating of your boiler taht you will need to do the calculation from this website:
http://www.sedbuk.com/cgi-local/dynamicv.cgi?page=boiler8

check the exact boiler make and model !


Originally Posted by owned by 2 Siamese
Spent a long time wrestling with this before I actually bought a house with oil. This is how I worked it out (hopefully its reasonably logical!)

Working out the cost of a KW of heat from oil (so you can compare to electric/gas)

- a litre of heating oil (kerosene 28 sec) burnt at 100% efficiency will release approximately 10KW of heat (this was a consistent figure from various internet/oil websites I searched in March)
- You now need to know the SEDBUK efficiency of your boiler (always given as a %) (if you're buying a new condensing biler the manufacturers website should tell you this)
- mutiply 10KW by the SEDBUK Efficiency (this is how much you'll get as useable heat from your boiler)

I have a condensing Worcester Danesmore boiler - (1 year old) quoting 92% so for every litre of oil I get 9.2KW of useable heat (if your boiler is more efficient you get more - and vice versa)

So a litre of oil (currently an eye watering 38.9p, plus VAT at 5% = 40.8p
take this figure and divide by the useable heat (9.2 for me) = 40.8/9.2 = 4.4p

This means that in effect each KW cost me 4.4p - and I can compare that to electricty (I'm paying about 8.5p inc VAT) so all told, comapred to standard daytime its cheaper to use oil - if you know your offpeak tarrif then you can compare (but remember to add on any increased day tariff if necessary).

When I looked LPG had a lower KWH per litre - but can find my notes to say how much - all I know was it worked out a lot more expensive.

Not sure if this proves anything other than how sad I am - or if it would ever pass any kind of 'review' but its the best I could find!

GromitFan

I too have just had the shock of the price of oil. Just ordered 500 litres as we are moving house within a few months. Have paid 46.34p + 5% VAT per litre, which I guess reading the December post isn't so bad, but it's about 10p per litre more than I paid in October.

Have just done the above calculations and have found with our boiler (85.1% efficient) that I pay 5.72p per kW (inclusive of VAT).

At present I'm on power 2 from Scottish Hydro which is 9.05p per unit, so it would still appear cheaper on oil for present, but how much longer with these price rises? The oil price just now is more than double what we were paying 3 1/2 year ago. I don't believe electric prices have risen by this amount.

Also, there's an economy 10 tariff offered by most suppliers, but not that widely publicised, which is probably of more use to most people than the ecocomy 7 tariff which is easily visible. Here's the link for some info on economy 10:
http://www.just-heating.co.uk/economy10.html
The details are from April last year, so you'd need to contact supplier(s) for up to date information.
Certainly with the pricing indicated there for Scottish Hydro E10 of 10.13p per unit peak and 5.98p per unit off peak it starting to look much closer on pricing.

I know that my sister has Economy 10 from Scottish Power and she reckons she's about £150 better off a quarter than when they had LPG heating.

The house we are moving to at present has old style panel heaters and I've no intention of installing an oil fired heating system with the oil prices keeping rising. Instead we plan to longterm change to underfloor electric heating and perhaps install some green measures such as SolarPV, wind or ground source. Sure with current energy prices it'd probably be questionable to using these, but the way it looks energy prices are more than likely to continue escalating, so it'd be nice to know that you're not fully tied to them.

samtheman1k

If you have normal radiators, then you could switch over to a heat pump based system that will avoid the disruption of installing new electric cables throughout your house. Will be cheaper to run than oil too according to the Nottingham energy partnership link that someone posted earlier

http://www.nottenergy.com/energy-costs-comparison2

Lotus-eater

samtheman1k wrote: »

http://www.nottenergy.com/energy-costs-comparison2

Thats a good link.

So according to the link, burning wood is the least polluting fuel? is that right?

border_collie

It is carbon neutral but not exactly "non polluting". If we all burnt wood we would have smog.

imeot

Lots of people make a mistake when calculating electric heating costs, since the best heaters are equipped with a thermostat function. That means the space heater doesn't have to run all the time. If the room is well insulated then you might achieve 20%/80% heating ratio which means the heater is turned off 80% of a time. Also you can set up heating patters with the timer switch on an electric heater, not on a gas one. I use DelLonghi "Dragon model" ( electric-heaters-review.com/delonghi-trd0715t-safe-heat-oil-filled-radiator-review ) and it has all the above mentioned features. You have to consider these aspects as well, when deciding between an fuel burning heater or an electric one.

dieselglider

Welcome to the forums with your first post. You do realise that this revived thread is nearly four years old now. Easy newbie mistake, I presume you were doing a search and found it..

sparkysystem

I'm really grateful that this thread is still available. It has useful information.

Writing in 2012

The link below still works for the boiler efficiency database. I had to disguise the link as new posters can't include links:
w w w . sedbuk . com


My cost for a litre of oil for my central heating is now 62.74 pence.

My cost of 1 kW of oil provided heat is about 9 pence and my electricity comes in at 14.75p per kW (I alway use up my 26.69p per kW first price step even if I do not use any heating).

A consideration in our house is that the family will not use the thermostatic valves on the radiators so we heat the whole house not just the rooms we are using.

Kind Regards to all who have come before...

Cardew

sparkysystem wrote: »

I'm really grateful that this thread is still available. It has useful information.

Writing in 2012

The link below still works for the boiler efficiency database. I had to disguise the link as new posters can't include links:
w w w . sedbuk . com


My cost for a litre of oil for my central heating is now 62.74 pence.

My cost of 1 kW of oil provided heat is about 9 pence and my electricity comes in at 14.75p per kW (I alway use up my 26.69p per kW first price step even if I do not use any heating).

A consideration in our house is that the family will not use the thermostatic valves on the radiators so we heat the whole house not just the rooms we are using.

Kind Regards to all who have come before...

Welcome to the forum.

www.sedbuk.co.uk

This link gives the theoretical efficiency of most gas and oil boilers in use in UK - even some 30+ years old.

I say 'theoretical' because the rated effeciency is not always achieved - especially the 90+% figures for modern condensing boilers.

14.75p/kWh for Tier 2 electricity is hugely expensive for a single rate tariff; it is still possible to get it under 10p/kWh(before the latest cuts)

Even for an economy 7 tariff it is high - if you have that tariff I assume you heat water with an Immersion heater at around 5p/kWh.

If the 'family won't use the TRV's - why Not!(presumably the children?) then just refuse to buy oil and remove any electrical heaters. It is crazy to heat bedrooms etc

sparkysystem

Just changed provider today for our electricity using the energyhelpline recommended by this site. We should save about £200 per year.

My night time tarriff is a fraction more than 5p and we do use it to heat the water.

My boiler is a Boulton Pathfinder 65/85 or something similar, it's probably 30 to 40 years old. The Boulton Pathfinders I could find are quoted at 85% efficient but I doubt that, when looking at our £1600 winter oil bill last year.

We moved in 20 years ago and the boiler was old then. I replaced the motor and all the moving parts about 8 years ago. The oil company's fitter said the cheapest he could source was £1000, I found the item for £250 delivered, the fitter installed for his original installation quote of £125, so good on him for that.

I don't think refusing to buy oil would get me any smartie points but thanks for the thought.