Central heating or electric heater for one room?

[TempleOfBloom]

I don’t usually sit and work in one space all day, or am out of the house.
To keep one small room warm shall I keep the central heating on but turn all the other radiators in the house off, or plug in a convection heater on low in that room?

Anyone? I am doing central heating version atm, as the electric heater is in the loft.

The boiler is a 3 year old eco something or other gas boiler.

I am happy with a temperature of about 17 -18 ‘

On the web it says average house heat loss is about 6kW. Obviously your house could vary massively from this, but my house is pretty average.

I need about 500W to keep my home office at 20C. Which according to the above figure is about 1/12th the entire house (that about makes sense in terms of room area actually).

Gas is about 4x the price of electric. So keeping one room warm with a convector heater rather than the entire house with gas saves me a factor of 3 on energy costs.

Yes. But I am planning on keeping the other radiators off, so not heating the whole house.

My work room is about a quarter of the size of the area of house I usually heat, so maybe it’s much of a muchness. I think I will go for the convector heater, for more control.

Maybe try it on two separate time intervals (say 2 days) and see how many units you use/which comes out the cheapest.

Try and do it when the temperatures outside are the same, because that can make quite a difference.

My guess is that if your office is 1/4 the heat leak it makes more sense on gas, because then in evening the rest of the house will already be warm when you want it. You could try using TRVs to lower the radiator temperature during the day is save money on the gas.

I have never tried heating my house in "thermostat" mode. Maybe I should try and see.

Martin Lewis' advice is to heat the person, not the room. So, heated poncho, heated lap blanket, hotwater bottles, fleeces. It's probably not worth the outlay if you're not going to be doing this for long.

I'm never over-confident about this as it depends on

• how damp your home is and whether there is adequate ventilation
• what you're doing and if your hands are likely to be so cold that you lose necessary dexterity.

It’s a complex matter, this energy thrift!

Are you sitting down to work? You can get heated blankets that you can wrap round yourself and a hot water bottle for your feet. It’s cheaper than heating the room.