Are electric radiators a lot more expensive?

[bubblerunner]

We are trying to rent a house and saw one with old electric heaters on the wall rather than gas central heating.

I know these can be expensive to run but does anyone know how much more? We are on a tight budget. Would it put you off the house?

Yes it would put me off. Generally electricity is 4x as expensive as gas. Old (storage?) heaters are probably not very efficient either.

Does it run on an Economy tariff, so you can take advantage of a cheaper rate overnight to "charge" them, if they are storage heaters?

If there is a saving in the rental price, it might be worth it though. Unless your only option for housing. Good luck, I hope you find something suitable soon.

Yes. And the newer ones, with the shiny marketing, don't use Economy 7 so cost much more to run than the old storage heaters. My heating engineer was telling me all this only last week.

@Twasasurprise@muddyford thanks for that. Definitely worth knowing. Maybe only if the house is super cheap then

10ish years ago we worked out it cost £1 per day per room to run them. I couldn’t believe it!

Electric storage heaters, if that's what I think they are, will cost a fortune these days owing to our insane energy prices. Thanks to net zero and geopolitical tensions.

10 years ago, Economy 7 was a thing, and therefore it was cheaper to have them on offpeak, ie overnight, the bricks inside the heaters would them let off the heat into the rooms keeping them warm in the colder months. It's all gone to smartmeters now, so no such tariff exists anymore. And even if it did still exist, the cost would be eye-watering now.

It really depends on how new the house is.

Electric is at least 3x more expensive than gas on a standard tariff.

But if the house is well insulated then you probably won't need that much heating anyway.

Plus with electric you won't need to change your boiler every 15 years, nor have it serviced every year which is about £100. Electric is far less likely to break down than gas heating.

You also might be able to lose the gas standing charge if there is no other gas in the house.

If you are capable of using all your power on a tariff like E7 then it gets relatively cheaper.

They're awful. We had them 30 years ago when we moved house. They were so expensive we could only put them on for an hour in the morning and a couple at night. Even then our winter quarter bill was £500!
We got them ripped out and gas installed and saved a fortune.

Economy 7 is definitely still a thing, there are other time of use tariffs available too. However, my experience with storage heaters was that the ones we had (probably installed circa 1990), had no way to control when they discharged the heat, so we had heat first thing in the morning - good for getting ready for work, but by the evening they were going cold, much of the heat was during the day when we were generally not at home.