Anyone any experience of night storage heaters?

[curlygirl]

I am househunting, found a great house in a lovely village but it does not have central heating. Anyone have any experience of using night storage heaters? I have heard that they keep the house hot when you don't need it etc.

I had storage heaters in a flat once - I had central heating put in after the first winter!

mind you that was quite a few yrs ago - I think they're a lot more effecient today.

Can you get a quote for putting in central heating and see if its feasible?

what I meanis that if I really liked the house, storage heaters would not put me off

DON'T DO IT!!! I've just moved from a house with night storage heaters. Mmmmm, lovely and toasty at 3am, but freezing cold by 6pm - perfect.

It may be that the heaters were old and not functioning properly. I know some have switches so you can just turn them on like normal electic heaters, but ours didn't!!

check how modern they are and what your other options would be with regards to heating.

we have night storage heaters and they are ok for taking the chill off the air in our larger rooms and very good at heating smaller rooms, but yes they do make it very hot early hours when they first come on. you need to get to grips with how to set the dials.
we were going to have radiators fitted but looking into it we couldn't......no mains gas here, and the new regulations on where you can place an oil tank (at least 2m from any wall) meant we couldn't have that as there was no room for one. so we had to go with storage heaters and we have a log burner in our living room for the really cold days.

I second Toothyboy's experience of storage heaters, but can I please stress, if you do go ahead with the house purchase, how important it is to check that they're securely fixed to the wall. They're filled with bricks and are really heavy, and years ago, one fell off in my friend's house. None of us had kids at the time, but now I'm a bit paranoid when I see them in houses with small children.

They are awful things, 2 of my old flats had them, we NEVER bothered with them until ds1 was born. You can't control how hot they are, they're boiling at 6am, then are freezing in the evening. Also incredibly expensive to run. A 1 bed flat used to cost us £90 per month electric!!!!!!!!

I must be feeling really inarticulate today - what I really meant is that I would buy a house with storage heaters if I could get central heating put in - I wouldn't want to rely on them permanently