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Storage Heaters
Hi,
We're looking at buying a property which is perfect in every way except that it uses storage heaters instead of central heating. I have no experience with that. I'm looking for some honest opinions. We spoke to the owner who was insistent that she noticed no difference in bills. She seemed genuine, but she is trying to get money off us, so I don't want to take her completely at face value even though she seemed lovely.
I gather that it's difficult to regulate when the house is warm enough and that there might be problems keeping it heated in the evening. Any thoughts? I'm not sure what exactly I'm looking for here but we're going for a second viewing tomorrow and I want to be prepared. Is there anything I should be asking to get more specific information?
We're looking at buying a property which is perfect in every way except that it uses storage heaters instead of central heating. I have no experience with that. I'm looking for some honest opinions. We spoke to the owner who was insistent that she noticed no difference in bills. She seemed genuine, but she is trying to get money off us, so I don't want to take her completely at face value even though she seemed lovely.
I gather that it's difficult to regulate when the house is warm enough and that there might be problems keeping it heated in the evening. Any thoughts? I'm not sure what exactly I'm looking for here but we're going for a second viewing tomorrow and I want to be prepared. Is there anything I should be asking to get more specific information?
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If you want to make savings on your electricity bill on Economy Seven tariff, make sure you move as much of your usage (such as heating, water heating, tumble-drying etc) to the overnight period to take advantage of the very cheap overnight electricity.
Hope this helps!
Gas central heating would be cheaper to run, as the cost of gas is less than 'cheap' overnight economy 7 rate. Plus if you are out during the day then the heat is wasted with storage, unless they are very well insulated and you turn off the output.
I have thought of changing to gas but the payback time is very long, especially if you take into account annual service cost and boiler replacements if you are unlucky.
Personally I think they are the devil's spawn. There are a number of reasons for this which I'll give you, but I will say they do have one advantage - they can be installed far easier than central heating. Like Diablo says as well there's no annual servicing.
First off it will be more expensive than gas. All electric heaters are 100% efficient so what you put in you get out in heat (and before some smart alec says some comes out as light on halogen heaters, yes that's visible infra red which is heat). An efficient gas boiler might be say 85% efficient, so for every pound you spend on gas you're wasting 15p. Let's say you want to heat a room at 1kw for the hour - EDF with gas in London costs 4.245p per unit right now so it's going to cost 4.88p to heat the room at 1kw for the hour with gas (I've multiplied it by 1.15 to account for the 15% loss of gas waste). You'll be charging your storage heater at night so a night rate in London is 6.32p per unit, so you're already paying 1.44p more per hour per single kwh. This could easily add up to a couple of hundred pounds per year.
This isn't where the disadvantages stop. You have to watch the weather forecasts like a hawk. Cold snaps you have to turn the night charge up otherwise it won't get hot enough the night before and you'll run out of heat the next day, forcing you to use the boost (if the heater has one) which will cost you over 10p more per kwh than the night rate. All sounds like small change but one single kwh won't keep a room warm in cold weather.
Or worse still you'll have too much heat and have to open windows if the weather is warmer than expected so you'll be chucking money away.
You'll need to work out the black magic of controlling the dampers. This is a manual setting so when you get home you'll have to open the dampers to let heat out. The way around this is an auto damper. Great for automatically closing down but not so great for storing heat - they open when your unit gets hot and try to distribute the heat evenly through the day. Fine if you are at home all day but if like most people you go out they are wasteful heating the home when no-one is there. Then if you forget to close the damper at night you're back to square one as it'll let all the heat out too early and you'll either be cold or have to pay the costly day rate to boost it.
Storage heaters maybe had their day in the 70's when electricity was cheaper but these days they are dinosaurs. Remember too if the house has storage heaters your water will probably be heated by electricity as well. If this was a house I was buying I'd look to negotiate a couple of grand off to cover costs of a new combi boiler wet radiator system. I say a couple of grand as a new system with rads will probably set you back double this but you have the added benefit of a brand new system so that's the argument you could use with the seller.
Believe me though they are definitely not cheaper, course they'll say that, she is trying to sell you a house. Saying that it's entirely possible she doesn't know the difference, after all what would she have it to compare against? Heating my home will cost a different amount to your home no matter what fuel it is because it's a different home. I guarantee you though if you heat the house in the same manner on this system in the house, then rip it out and have gas installed and it's a similar winter the following year your bills will be much less.
I've since moved and have regular central heating I can set and switch off on anytime by moving thermostat.
They are unresponsive to British weather. What that means is you have to know 24hrs in advance what the temperature is likely to be the next day.
And changes of weather during the day are bad news. Frequent window opening is the norm, to expel all the excess heat you have. Or the weather turns and it's time to wheel out a convector heater of an evening.
Imagine a storage heater in a bedroom. All that heat is basically wasted since that room is mostly unlived in.
Unless... there are newer models that deal with this problem. Which I doubt, because the basic concept of storage heaters is the problem.
I don't think they are reason not to buy a house though. It's possible to live with them, just not very convenient.
My parents have them, and refuse to change.
But they have a legacy tariff which gives them 13 hours of "off-peak" electricty a day. This comes by way of a separate off-peak circuit which has a separate meter and a special clock which controls the power to the circuit.
This means the heaters get both an afternoon and early evening "boost" to keep the place toasty.
Benefits are:-
They are safe, never need servicing beyond a quick vacuum.
In a powercut, they remain hot for 6 hours and warm for another 3-6 hours.
The house always remains warm.
Don't forget, if you have a gas boiler, you will probably have a gas service contract with British Gas or similar. Around £300 a year. At the rate quoted for London - that's around 4500 units of off-peak electricity.
I can understand them wanting to stay on a legacy contract but the OP won't get 13 hours off peak electric, they will either get 7 hours or 10 hours (and the 10 hours are a higher unit cost than 7 hours).
You list a benefit of the house always being warm, that may be fine for people who never go out but they will be in the minority.
As for the gas servicing contract that's silly money you're talking. I had a new boiler put in last year with a 7 year warranty on all parts and labour (Vaillant), the only thing I have to do is pay £50 each year for its service. Much cheaper than storage heaters which do need repairing when they go wrong - my late grandparents had a mix of old and new heaters and no electrician would touch them as they didn't know what they were doing. My dad passed on the fixing skills down to me so it was jokingly a family tradition. I've replaced more elements and fuses than I care to remember over the years, storage heaters are definitely not a fix and forget product.
How much would it be to get an electrician to repair an element?
£300 per year is probably British Gas price, when I arranged service for mum's GCH (Baxi Bermuda) I paid about £90 for it. Which isn't a huge cost but needs to be taken into account.
My modern (i.e. 25 year old
If I had a house without any heating in it now, then I'd put in a wall mounted gas boiler and rads, plus a couple of gas fires to use for that one week in winter where the GCH is on the blink and the engineer can't get the parts.
A lot of engineers think that modern gas boilers are rubbish and don't last long, apart from Worcester perhaps.
Not everyone with a gas boiler has a contract with anyone, we dont have ours under contract and if there are any problems I get my dad in!
Oh yes, the window opening and I too had to get a convection heater for the evenings. I will never live anywhere that has storage heaters again.
Listen to this and my advice is NEVER buy a place with storage heating as it's useless. If you love the house then factor in 5k or so to get in central heating before you move in.
Granted they may have over come these issues in the last 20 year's, but personally I would be put off a property if it came with storage heaters.
Price wise I am finding gas combi boiler to be rather expensive considering I only have heating on for 1-2 hours a day so I don't seem to be saving much money without them. I am looking at moving and am intending to steer clear of anywhere with them, although I may not have much choice. Any way you would be able to replace them at some point?
I am sure they are a bit more efficient these days, but you still have to think ahead, much prefer GCH these days.
If you love the house then look into putting in GCH, if that cant be done then I would not take a house.
Most of them pay £50pw for electricity in the winter, despite the houses being double glazed and well-insulated. I live in a house of comparable size, with single glazing, and my bills for gas AND electricity are less than £100 a month.
I lived in a flat with them for a year and vowed never again. Even with the boost setting for the evening, it was warm during the day when I was at work and cold in the evenings when I got home.
Up there it was impossible to get the flat we lived in properly warm in winter, it just never happened and I vowed then never to live in another place with storage heating....
Now we are in a small bungalow down South and the two storage heaters heat the main parts of the house just fine. We have electric heaters for the bedrooms that are used as and when we need them. Obviously our electric bills are much more expensive in the winter but it evens out over the summer, so we pay by direct debit and end up with a flat rate of £28 a month.
So I'd say storage heaters very much depend on where you live, the size of the house, how many you have etc.
I moved into a property with them 2 years ago and fully expected them to be a nightmare but I think they're great. I had always had gas central heating in the past. Mine are early 90s era looking Credas.
Money wise they're pretty cheap I find. I don't have a gas supply at all so everything is electric. The storage heaters have been on since about September and are still on now - £38 a month leccy bill and I'm in credit by £30 odd. It has dropped to £29 this month for the summer months too! I have a small place but there is a big 3, a 2 and a 1kw radiator that are on every night. Prior to November 2013 I was paying over 50 quid a month though with my last electricity supplier, and they were wanting to put it up again. You have to be careful with which tariff you go for. I was using about a third of my energy through the night but it was a pain trying to do washing/dishwashing between 12am and 7am so I went for a one where the night electricity was a bit more expensive but the day rate and standing daily rate was cheaper.
Despite snow or whatever outside, I've had the input side nowhere near max, normally about 2/3rds and since it has become warmer outside down to almost off. The output is easy - I have the dial as tight against closed as I can and it never moves! It's only a metal flap that moves a few mm so it still leaks more than enough heat out when it's closed. I like the way they get the house at a toasty temperature all day instead of having heating coming on every few hours and it getting boiling hot then cooling down again. The only time they become a pain is this time of year when the sun is streaming in through the window but it's cold in the house at night. Not much you can do about that other than put up with the heat or open the window and hope that there is enough heat in the heater for later on (I normally find there is TBH).
If you have a dehumidifier then there is no better way to get washing dried than putting it on a clothes horse in front of the heaters overnight and running a dehumidifier alongside over the cheap rate time.
So I like 'em. I think there's only been two times where I've been a cheapskate and put the heating off overnight and been freezing the next night. There should be a boost function to switch them on on the electricity meter but it doesn't do anything on mine.
The concept is fine if you want to sweat your bits off at 2 am, and be freezing by 7 pm
The concept is that you charge up the storage heater with heat produced using "cheap" off-peak electricity, to be released only when you want it.