How much does your central heating cost per hour?

[Mañanarama]

Feck I’m cold. Just put an oil filled heater on in my living room, soon switched it off when the electric rose 10p in four minutes on the smart meter.

We reckon the central heating for the whole house costs just over £1 per hour. Is that a lot? How much is yours?

And is there a cheaper heating device that I could buy to heat just one room during the day, when I am the only one at home?

Any suggestions warmly welcomed!

And yet it warms my large open plan living room enough to work in during the day.

The vat is one thing but the standing charge is the killer as it's there no matter how little fuel you use.

Ran my gas fire for half hour yesterday morning, then the GCH for a smidge under two hours - total cost was £1.43

I have an archaic imperial gas meter that is outside so not easy to deal with. I have been taking photos and correlating it to kwh costs. It was about 60p for an hour but that was with just 1 radiator on and a towel rail. I've switched them all off as I now get around he house looking like the abominable snowman. It is miserable.

1 little unit thing, can't remember technical name, is worth approx 3.14kwh. 1 whole imperial unit is approx 31kwh. My very rough maths, due to the accessibility issues of the outside meter are in keeping with what Shell have estimated for me this past two weeks.

My boiler is a 30Kw Worcester approx 10 years old. Reading comments here suggests my boiler is not trying to get to and maintain such a high temperature.

This might be worth a read regarding flow and return temperature as this could be how I am keeping my costs down albeit with very strict usage.

www.theheatinghub.co.uk/articles/turn-down-the-boiler-flow-temperature

So yesterdays figure was 95kWh for 5.75 hours of heating so average £1.70 per hour

I have an archaic imperial gas meter that is outside so not easy to deal with

It doesn’t make any difference to the difficulty of the conversion whether you are dealing with cubic feet or cubic metres.

I think the point was that the meter is difficult to reach and read, rather than the conversion is hard

I know...

It is just not as quick to work out especially being outside in a difficult to reach place.

Yep I bought one last year. It's crap. Plugged it in by the kettle and used to lean my face into it after a dog walk. Gathering dust in a drawer now.

Well, I find it warms my living room in about an hour.

Update from my experimenting!

I did have heating on 24/7 with the thermostat set to 19 degrees. £6-£7 a day in gas excluding VAT & SC.

Turned it off between 8pm - 6am, switched off a hall radiator, turned down the water temperature AND turned the thermostat down a degree to 18.

For the last 3 days this has been in effect and to my astonishment....the cost has been exactly the same.

I'm baffled.

I heard something the other day saying that the amount of energy used/needed to heat a room doesn't change - so if you use eg a 200w heater, it will need to be on 10x longer than a 2kw heater to achieve the same room temperature. Basically the cost will be the same whichever you use (if you're heating a space rather than just blowing hot air in your face).

It depends how the device generates heat, doesn't it?

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They were comparing your exact heater type (plug in ceramic heater with a fan) against other electric heater types - it's the Sliced Bread programme from radio 4 posted earlier.

if you use eg a 200w heater, it will need to be on 10x longer than a 2kw heater to achieve the same room temperature.

As long as the device you are using produces heat faster than the room loses it.

I live in a 1930s 3-bed semi and have a 30kw gas boiler. I set the thermostat to 17, turned all of the radiators to number 2 (apart from 2 rooms), and ran the heating for 24 hours. It averaged out at £3 per hour over that 24 hours so needless to say I won't be doing that again 😂

£74 for 24 hours?

We had our heating on for a total of 44 hrs in November. Cost £110.
Not even an hr and a half a day 😫
(Gas hob too but definitely not used daily)
Last November we had the heating on for 94 hrs .... cost £78.

Yep! I've bought a couple of Calor gas fires to use instead. I know a few people with a slightly smaller house and smaller boiler have said it's costing them £2.50 an hour to run theirs at a similar temperature.

I hear you @samstownsunset I have been experimenting with different temps and settings and can see no big differences. It could be because the temperature outside is still mild, so the boiler is not having to work as hard. Definitely not complaining but the ideal settings for my central heating remains a mystery.

I took a photo of the gas meter before and after having a bath, with just the central heating on for just over an hour, not heating any water.. we have a system with a hot water tank not a combi.
I've worked it out two different ways and both methods show that it costs about £1.12 for just over an hours heating.

@NewBootsAndRanty

it makes no difference anyway as it's a pointless question (Sorry OP)

it depends on so many things, there's absolutely no way to compare one home to another!

size/insulation/windows open/closed single/double tripple glazed/front/back doors being opened, flooring. Etc etc.

always interesting to chat about, but no actual comparisons can be made.

first hour is always the most expensive though!

Is your thermostat in the hall? If so and you've turned the rad off in there, it may mean your boiler is on more to compensate perhaps?

My storage heaters cost £1.30 an hour, putting the heater on for an hour throws out an extra hour of heat so basically about 70p an hour. I also have a oil radiator that costs 90p an hour on maximum settings.. my heating costs about £6.50 a day not including other costs.

having just looked again now its cold average is 17kWh per hour so around £1.80 per hour with heating set to 18.5 and boiler temp at 60 deg