To ask the MN hive-mind about storage heaters?

[Grendalsmum]

Bloody things - just gave in to the weather and turned them on last night and this morning two are still cold as charity. Has anyone ever sucessfully fixed a duff storage heater or is it time to re-morgage the house and buy new ones? We are all electric heating on economy 7 tarif so just binning the lot in favour of something less annoying isn't really an option ...

We have the same. Bloody hate the things, they're always cold by evening. I'd never buy a house with them again. We had most of ours replaced when we moved in but they said one was fixable. Electrician came out three times to fix it and it still didn't work. Gave up after that. I don't know if that means all storage heaters are impossible to fix though or if it was just ours.

Storage heaters are never hot when you want them to be. What about oil filled radiators instead?

Storage heaters are terrible, our old house had one and a rubbish plug in heater in the bedroom.
Our neighbors ripped theirs out when they moved in and had an electric radiator installed, it was presumably just as expensive to run but they didn't have to wait a couple of days to heat the room!
like this one

They are not great. Check the input dial - I have mine on 1.5 out of 5 at the moment. Output dial I set at 3 overnight, then turn down to Frostguard when I get up, then increase it when I am home and room temp goes below 18 degrees.

I've never had one breakdown so never repaired.

Does your storage heater have a boost? That is a normal convector heater, with a thermostat, on daytime electric rate so don't leave on all the time.

Mine have switched sockets, so I can turn off the Eco7 part, or the convector part, or both. Check if you have switched sockets, just in case someone has switched it off - thus causing no overnight heatup.

Both switched on at the wall - just haven't heated up overnight. DP is muttering darkly about buggered heating elements. Can you replace the elements when they go poof?

I did wonder about oil-filled radiators instead but l think if you're on economy 7 your daily tarif is higher to make up for the lower off-peak night time one, so running the radiator during the day would be pretty expensive. Gah ...

If you were to stop using Eco7 you would want to change tariff, as the Eco7 tariff rates do tend to have higher daytime rate than a normal tariff.

Eco7 is likely used to heat water as well as your room heating, so take that in account if deciding to switch from Eco7.

A neighbour has IR panels, they seem really good. They have a Herschel Infrared panel mounted to the ceiling of each room.

Same happpened to me a couple of days ago...I turned it off and on again at the wall and now it's working!

Ooh - l'll give that a try. If it's just the wall switch that's knackered that's much cheaper to fix!