Cheap to run electrical heating systems?

[angiehugo]

Hi I'm soon to be putting in a new heating system in a second floor flat. I put night storage heaters in the first floor flat but the tenants are complaining it's too expensive to run! I've seen adverts for "Economy Rads Co" that are a form of panel heater and claim to be more efficient than n/s but it is the co that makes them saying so. I have also seen ads for "german engineering type heaters" once again claiming that they are better than n/s. Please can someone give me honest advice as I'm trying to keep costs down for my tenants. Thanks

 

[ProDave]

Night store is as cheap as you can get, as the overnight rate is roughly half the peak rate.

Switch to an economy 10 tarrif if that's available, as that will also give you a mid day cheap rate top up so your storage heaters are less likely to run out of heat in the evening.

Any form of peak rate electric heating is going to be expensive. People think gosh, gas has gone up a lot so I might switch to something else, but everything has gone up.

Also, my experience of peak rate heating, is the tenants are affraid to turn them on for fear of large bills, so they are likely to keep the flat cold most of the time, which will lead to condensation problems. We had a lot of condensation problems because the tenants would not use the peak rate heater in the bedroom enough. As soon as we put a storage heater in th bedroom, the place was much warmer and the condensation problems went away.

 

[angiehugo]

Hi Prodave,

Thank you for your reply. I agree with you about the tenants not using the heating, I've noticed that there's condensation starting on the inside of the windows and as the place hadn't been lived in for a couple of years I really need them to use the n/s. I'll find out if economy 10 is available, I'd not heard of it before I started looking at electric heating, I have gas at home. Once again thank you for your reply it's nice to get a straight answer.

Regards Angie

 

[Andy™]

electric heating is pretty much 100% efficient. if one claims to be 'energy saving', then it wont be giving out as much heat

 

[Technician]

Angie if the flat is all electric you are the winner.

Night storage E7 or E10 was designed for users

with no mains gas.

If the heaters have thermostats upon them that

you can set to stop them turning on if the room

temp is high enough you should be all right.

On condensation, run a dehumidifier on a timer

and the heating costs will go down.

 

[cr0ft]

The best system on the market (in my opinion) at the moment are the Thermaflow electric combi-boilers. You get wet central heating with them too. Basically they are a storage heater with 4 immersion heaters. You use it on an Economy 10 tariff and it heats the water in the cylinder up (which is central heating circuit water) in the off-peak periods. Cold mains water just runs through a heat exchanger inside the cylinder to produce hot water on demand. If the cylinder runs out of heat in the peak periods then it will use 2 immersion heaters to keep it topped up. The key is choosing the right size of cylinder so it doesn't.

You get mains pressure hot and cold water throughout the house. The only ongoing service cost is an annual service of the cylinder which must be undertaken by a plumber with the unvented hot water qualification.

The last one we installed was in a 3 bedroom terraced house. There bill was working out at

 

[ProDave]

The best system on the market (in my opinion) at the moment are the Thermaflow electric combi-boilers. You get wet central heating with them too. Basically they are a storage heater with 4 immersion heaters.

Interesting system. One that actually makes a great deal of sense as it uses predominantly off peak electricity.

Even better, reading that, Scottish Power do an off peak tarrif with 18 hours of cheap rate a day Economy 2000 | Scottish Power | Thermal Genius

And if you combined it with a solar feed as well, even better.

I'm surprised it works so well though. Years ago, when refurbishing my last house, I considered trying to make my own "storage boiler" with a bank of hot water cylinders heated from immersion heaters overnight on economy 7. I concluded that it was impractical to use water as a heat storage medium for whole house heating as the number of cylinders of water needed was just silly. However I'll bet this works on the fact that with an off peak tariff like E10 or Economy 2000, it doesn't have to keep stored heat for so long, so not as much storage needed as the system I thought about.

The servicing is important with unvented systems. It's important to make sure the over pressure and over temperature relief valves are working. This is much more of an issue heating directly by electricity, as a failed thermostat can cause the water to boil.

But I am surprised the storage cylinder needs to be unvented. I'm increasingly seeing "heat store" central heating systems installed. These work like a hot water tank "inside out" The boiler heats the water in the tank directly (not via a heat exchange coil) and crucially these are fed from a header tank, so the cylinder is vented. Then the water take off for heating comes direct from the cylinder, and it's only the hot water, that comes via a heat exchange coil in the tank, that's at mains pressure, so no different to any mains pressure pipe.

So if someone could make one of these based on the vented heat store cylinder that would be even better as there would be no pressurised tank and no maintenance liability.

 

[cr0ft]

Hmm. I suspect the reason is most new bathroom fittings etc are now high pressure and the tendency in the plumbing world is to 'rip-out' low pressure systems where possible and replace them with high-pressure ones.