More flexible electric heaters

MalthouseMark

Hi, newbie here.

We live in a listed building with no possibility of gas, oil, heat pump. We have electric and that’s all.

We have Rointe K series heaters which were fitted by the previous owners 15 years ago. They do heat up the rooms but they are clunky to use and as a result we use more electricity than we need to.

These heaters are programmable but only by the hour. In the depths of winter we’ve watched the smart meter tick through £25 a day (the joys of old stone built buildings with sash windows)!

We looked at replacement heating options but all we could find were programmable by the hour.

In our old home if we went to bed early we could turn the thermostat down to save money but turning down three heaters in the lounge alone would be a pain. Similarly we could twist the thermostat on the bedroom radiator to turn it up fifteen minutes before bed and that was easy.

We regularly go to bed early or wake up early and the radiators are heating a room that we are no longer using… or won’t come on for a little while yet.

The manual capability is pretty primitive too.

This morning we were up early. The program to warm the bedroom kicked in after we were up and dressed. I went into the bedroom much later and felt the warmth. Then I went into my home office and it was cold. It would have been great to switch which room was getting heated.

Similarly the heaters allow you to choose one temperature on the program for “eco” temperature and one for “comfort” temperature. So I could program 8°C for overnight frost free and then 15°C for early on, 20°C for breakfast, back down to 15°C for the morning and so on. We couldn’t suddenly pick 23°C on a cold day to feel warmer. It’s not a flexible system.

Meanwhile our bedroom light is connected to a smart plug and a routine so we can say to Alexa that we are going to bed and the lights go off upstairs, the lights go on downstairs. (Our home is upside down.) It would be fabulous to tell Alexa to put the bedroom radiator on fifteen minutes before bed time and then when we say we are going to bed it flicked the lounge to “frost free” 8°C at the same time as it sorted the lights.

Meanwhile, too, our immersion heater has a timer with programmable on/off that could be tuned by the minute!

I regularly dislike our heating and wish it was far more controllable.

Have any other users got a similar “electric heaters only” scenario and found a more modern and flexible setup?

Everything that we have found has either restrictions on the temperatures allowed, the times (eg hourly slots), or just not even vaguely connected to the modern world. Or all three!

QrizB

As far as direct electric heating goes, storage heaters and an off-peak tariff like Economy 7 will be much cheaper to run than your current system. They're not cheap to install, though; budget £1k per room, as a rough guide.

See the link in my signature for comparative running costs.

MalthouseMark

QrizB said:

As far as direct electric heating goes, storage heaters and an off-peak tariff like Economy 7 will be much cheaper to run than your current system.

Cheaper, but how flexible? We remember Economy 7 from days of old and horrible heaters that were not even vaguely flexible. This house used to have E7 but was switched some years ago so it would need more than just new heaters.

QrizB

MalthouseMark said:

QrizB said:

As far as direct electric heating goes, storage heaters and an off-peak tariff like Economy 7 will be much cheaper to run than your current system.

Cheaper, but how flexible? We remember Economy 7 from days of old and horrible heaters that were not even vaguely flexible. This house used to have E7 but was switched some years ago so it would need more than just new heaters.

Reading your opening post, it seemed to me that you were looking for flexibility as a way to reduce your heating bills. Fundamentally, though, that's never going to shave more than a few % off.

In order to put a proper dent in your bills, you need to pay less for your energy. E7 gives you that.

While a proper E7 installation with a meter-switched circuit gives you far more options for tariffs (like Snug Octopus), you can run a smart storage heater like a Dimplex Quantum from a single-rate supply. It has an internal timer that you can programme with the cheap rate timings.

Pinging @Gerry1 and @EssexHebridean who all have relevant knowledge, I think?

I've also asked for this thread to be moved to the Energy forum, where the rest of the electric heating geeks hang out.

MalthouseMark

@QrizB, cost is definitely a factor but being able to be flexible with how we use our heaters, for comfort, is more important in all honesty.

flashg67

Same situation as you. We use Millheat heaters, infinitely controllable on the app, so we try to just heat rooms when we're using them, so bedroom on first thing/last thing, spare room on a minimum, say 7 degrees, turn the home office to minimum on weekends & days off etc. We also have a multifuel stove in the lounge, but even wood/coal isn't cheap nowadays.
As you already know, electricity is an expensive form of heating but the Millheat work better for us than the old storage heaters they replaced.

check out millnorway.com 

Gerry1

@MalthouseMark @flashg67 Sorry, but you've both got the worst heating systems possible in the UK.  They use crazily expensive daytime electricity.  No matter how carefully you set them you're spending far, far more than necessary. It's like running a car on champagne and trying to use the throttle sparingly...

They may make sense on the continent in small well insulated flats on cheap French nuclear or Nordic hydro tariffs, but certainly not here. 

Modern High Heat Retention NSHs are worlds apart from the old Box of Bricks ones dating back to the 1970s when electricity was as cheap as chips so it didn't matter if everywhere was toasty at 4am.  They're fully controllable, you tell them how hot you want the room to be and at what times and it does the rest.  You can tell them to protect against frost and damp when you're away and to heat up fully just before you return.

MalthouseMark

@Gerry1 yes, I am aware that whoever put them in fifteen years ago wasn’t “cooking on gas” (I hate to think how old that advert is now).

I did look at @QrizB link in his footer to see what difference E7 might make but couldn’t make head or tail of it. ChatGPT couldn’t give me a good percentage of saving for E7 compared to non-E7. Best it could do after a long chat was suggest savings between 7 and 30%. Let’s be optimistic and use the 30% figure.

We are currently with Utility Warehouse Double Gold tariff and manage to run our home on about 10,000 kWh a year (rolling 12 month average) and £200 per month (again rolling 12 month average) which covers (obviously) all heating and cooking, computers, lighting etc. January is usually the worst month and last month’s bill for December was 1206 kWh at £282 or £299 including standing charge. (UW put our 12 month usage as 9183 kWh),

Assuming £1000 per room to convert (ignoring all the sockets which have been switched in the home and cost of converting the wiring), we have, downstairs, bathroom, two bedrooms, one home office, and a hall heater, upstairs a hall heater and a large odd split-level room with three heaters in it. I’ll call that seven rooms for ease. Call it £7k to convert.

Electricity bills at £200x12 = £2,400.

Assuming that we could save as much as 30% on our usage pattern and bringing £2,400x0.7=£1,680 saving £2,400-£1680=£720 per year.

£7,000/£720=9.722 years to recoup the outlay. Certainly power prices will only go up so it may be less, and if heating is our main component of our bill then savings could be higher and payback time sooner.

That’s a heck of a long payback time.

Which is why I have to look at it in terms of comfort and convenience first and foremost. At our age a long payback time isn’t something to ponder too hard. Real cost savings are all very well… once any changes have paid for themselves.

We took the same approach for getting the place double glazed and used some of a pension lump sum to have more comfort - not to save money. Well worth it!

Updating a few key rooms for comfort (our bedroom, my office, and our lounge) and then, if we can afford it later, changing the hall, spare room, and bathroom, is more likely.

knightstyle

Don't forget you are paying for the heat that escapes from the house. A perfectly insulated house will not need any heating appart from the hot water.  So best to invest on insulating walls, loft and floor as this will save you money in the long run.

danrv

MalthouseMark said:

This house used to have E7 but was switched some years ago 

The wiring would still be in place I would have thought. I had a similar situation a few years ago with my all electric property.
I opted for aircon for downstairs heating but Quantum or Elnur HHR storage heaters were the 2nd option.
I use basic convector electric radiators with built in timers for bedrooms. Very easy to use with no programming needed.

MalthouseMark

knightstyle said:

Don't forget you are paying for the heat that escapes from the house. A perfectly insulated house will not need any heating appart from the hot water.  So best to invest on insulating walls, loft and floor as this will save you money in the long run.

Listed building. Walls of stone about a metre thick. Sash windows. It's as insulated as it is going to get.