Night Storage Heaters : please advise!

Softkittywarmkitty

I live in a medium sized, brick walled, detached house built in 1954. We do not have gas in the area at all. My house is entirely heated by ancient night storage heaters, 8 in total. They run off Economy 7, but the house was never warm. My electricity bill in winter was exceeding £1000 a month! ( I discovered this after my husband died. I'm now on a single income with a child, this is unsustainable and we've had no heat on this year)
I have some savings and need to replace the heaters. The house is not 'air tight', it is insulated.
Two well known heating companies have quoted me £11, 400 to replace with a new storage heating system. This seems a lot to me and I'm not convinced it would save me enough money to justify it. Does anyone have any ideas please? 

FlorayG

No. Just don't. There are many, many threads on here about 'electric heating companies' charging thousands. One of my friends has Fischer (use the search function and look for Fischer) and they are rubbish. Get in a decent electrician who will advise on some decent radiators from somewhere like Screwfix which will be about £200 - £300 each plus fitting ( in fact, a lot don't even need fitting and wiring in, you can just plug them into a socket until you can save up enough to have them hardwired)
I have quite a large bungalow and my local electrician quoted me about £2,500 for electric radiators all through

Keep_pedalling

You say it is insulated, but it does not sound like it is very good, do you have a EPC rating for it? If you are losing a ton of heat through the walls new rads are not going to help very much. 

TheElectricCow

Based on your description, it doesn’t sound like installing new heaters will resolve the problem of the cold or save a huge sum in running costs. Look towards further improving the insulation first, as keeping the heat in better will probably be a more cost effective change than primarily looking at expensive alterations to the method of producing that heat. Removing drafts or adding extra loft insulation often can be relatively cheap/easy improvements to consider which may bring a worthwhile benefit.

Any kind of electric heating, new or old, will use the same amount of energy to heat a space up by the same amount, so swapping out old storage heaters for new ones may not reduce the amount of electric being consumed. The biggest benefit of newer storage heaters is that they hold onto their heat better and are much more controllable in when that heat is released. While old ones tend to continually “leak” heat whenever they are hot, newer models can be set to, for example, rerelease more of their heat only in the evening than throughout the entire day or at night when charging. New storage heaters may help you stay warmer later in the day and by extension can reduce some energy consumption if you don’t need all day heating (which would otherwise be wasted), but if you really want to reduce energy consumption you’ll want to reduce the heat being lost in the first place.

The one caveat to the above is with heat pumps, which can produce more heat than the amount of energy they need to run. Although these are typically installed with wet heating systems (needing pipe work and radiators etc. adding cost/complexity to your installation) and may not be very effective if the house is already doing a poor job of retaining heat.

FlorayG said:

No. Just don't. There are many, many threads on here about 'electric heating companies' charging thousands. One of my friends has Fischer (use the search function and look for Fischer) and they are rubbish. Get in a decent electrician who will advise on some decent radiators from somewhere like Screwfix which will be about £200 - £300 each plus fitting ( in fact, a lot don't even need fitting and wiring in, you can just plug them into a socket until you can save up enough to have them hardwired)
I have quite a large bungalow and my local electrician quoted me about £2,500 for electric radiators all through

Electric radiators would not be an appropriate solution in this scenario - the OP is on an Economy 7 tariff in a house with what seems to be a very high heating demand, as implied by the requirement for 8 storage heaters which aren’t adequately heating the property. That’s a lot of energy being consumed and presumably lost. Replacing these storage heaters with electric radiators and sacrificing the E7 rate would make the running costs even more expensive, and would likely be one of the worst things they could do to save money (second only to installing the electric radiators and keeping the E7 rate).

It’s very important to distinguish between the kind of electric heaters you mention and quality modern High Heat Retention storage heaters.

The electric radiators sold for thousands of pounds filled with “wonder materials” such as magic dusts or German clays are nothing more than nicely presented snake oil products flogged by companies to people who don’t know any better, and as you rightly point out, these should be avoided if the goal is saving money.

On the other hand, HHR storage heaters (e.g. the Dimplex Quantum) are actual storage heaters designed to work with off-peak tariffs and are built to modern standards. Properly utilising an off-peak tariff, such as E7, with storage heaters is absolutely a genuine and feasible way to save money.

Some HHRs, depending on size and features, may well have a retail price tag in the region of £1000 each, although I’d be surprised if the OP genuinely requires 8 new HHRs of that high spec. I suspect there may be cheaper options for installation of new storage heaters, but it’s difficult to judge without knowing the details of what the property needs and exactly what is included in the quotes they’ve received.