Anyone just have electricity?

[FAQs]

Morning,

I’ve put an offer in on a cottage which is only heated by electricity. It does have a log burner but I’m not sure how much heat that throws out.

No option for gas in the village.

Currently live in a gas centrally heated new build. Gas and electricity combined is around £40-50 per month.

If you run a house in electric how much do you pay roughly per month?

@FAQs
No, my ASHP is very quiet. I now notice next door's oil burner going when I am i the garden!
We were concerned about the noise element as our neighbours have a patio area next to our mutual fence, and we didn't want to disturb them, so we went to visit another of our installer's customers to check. I think it might depend on the fan, ours is a Mitshubi. The fans have to be 1m from a fence , but even stood next to it i barely hear it.
My only complaint is that the pipes in the airing cupboard are so well lagged that there is no additional warmth in there, so no warm clothes from leaving them on the tank.
Obviously this winter will show how warm it is, and the real costs.

Is it only a log burner or a multi fuel? Our newer storage heaters are Sunhouse and Dimplex. Other option is you can have a stove with back boiler and run radiators from that. Really need to stock up on coal and make sure logs are dry and seasoned. You will be amazed how many logs you go through if stove on continuously.

Hi OP, we have a few countryside pals who do multi-fuel burners only.

They have trees on the land though and a LARGE wood store, which means if they're organised they can have dry wood all year for free...

They have one in every fireplace - I think 4 in total. it's a lovely toasty house :)

Best of luck!

I currently live in an electric only house which we are selling (had an offer very quickly). We had old terrible storage heaters which left it roasting in the morning and cold at night. We replaced them with modern thermostat controlled plug in electric heaters (Rointe), and pay about £50 a month averaged over the year. The house is now toasty in the winter with a constant temperature and very easy to control.

I'm buying a house with electric only. They have electric underfloor heating. I'll soon find out what it's like!

We also don’t have mains gas.
Our house was all electric and we had night storage heaters.

We were either boiling or freezing, but mostly in the evening when you need the heat it had all gone. No matter how I fiddled with the controls on the storage heater.

We saved up and installed oil. Now we have central heating like normal people. Oh my goodness! The difference is amazing.

We have a largish house and to install the boiler and oil tank, all the work was 10k.

We’ve got a big boiler that lives outside in a box because oil boilers need to be on the ground level unlike gas. So we had no space inside. So it’s outside.

Grew up with log burner and atorage heaters. Log burner was great when going (and heated water) but voracious to feed and storage heaters basically useless. Looked into oil central heating (quoted £6-£7k) but then got ASHP for approx £1500 and it has been life changing. V.quiet, house always gently warm, just lovely.

I'm in a 3 bed bungalow [no gas] with a multi fuel stove in the kitchen/diner. I ripped out storage heaters, changed the tariff and bought gel-filled radiators [look the same as the oil filled ones].

The bungalow is well insulated and I am at home the majority of the time most days. I burn hard wood logs in the evenings and stay in the kitchen/diner. I put on a radiator in the bedroom 20 minutes before I go to bed to take the chill off on really cold nights, that's all.

I use the radiators in the day sometimes, and any time spent in the lounge means I shut the door and it is warm in there quickly. But I do wear 2 tops in the winter and favour tops made of wool.

When the log burner is going I open the door and the excess heat circulates around the other rooms. The logs cost me £250ish per year and my electricity is £25 per month, spread over the year. I have showers more often than baths [unvented water cylinder]. I do not understand the high bills others have. Probably because I only heat the room I am in.

Thank you for the advice, lots for me to look at, the hot water is also heated just by an electric immersion heater.

Should say our hot water is also electric immersion which is included in the amount I stated above, and we have an electric shower and no bath if that makes any difference 🤷🏼‍♀️

No gas here,so we had an air source heat pump installed.It is very quiet and runs all our hot water and heating. We've been in the house since March and it costs about £80 a month to run (2000 sq ft house). We get about £600 a year back under the RHI scheme. However,this is a super insulated,airtight eco house, apparently they aren't as effective when they are retro fitted into older less insulated housing stock.

We are also looking into Ashp, more for eco reasons as we need to replace our old gas boiler. You need good insulation but can pick them up second hand from eBay.

We’re also considering Infrared heaters as top up heat for office / sofa or anywhere we sit still. They heat the person not the air so give efficient but targeted heat (like sitting in sunshine).

You may find that keeping the stove going keeps the house quite reasonably warm without much extra heating. Our Rayburn and one of the open fires is all we need for 2/3rds of the cooler months and even then only had the heating on for two hours a day beyond that in the middle of last winter.

If wood fired I hope you have plenty of space and a tree surgeon in the family. If it can take coal it tends to be vastly cheaper buying a few tons at a time than little bits here and there.

We have electricity and oil fired heating in this cottage but in my previous cottage I just had a log burner and storage heaters. The cottage was one bedroomed and dated from 15thC (no double glazing and very thick walls), I had what is locally known as a Suffolk bedroom (the stairs went straight up from the living room into the bedroom, no doors between the spaces) and even on the coldest days the log burner chucked out enough heat to warm the bedroom as well as the downstairs space. In this place though we need to use the central heating to warm the bedrooms. I know from previous experience just how expensive storage heaters are and how inefficient they can be so it would put me off unless I was sure the log burner could heat the whole place.

Electric only here, massive old leaky house.
No option to connect to gas, wouldn't have done anyway, same for oil - don't want to use fossil fuels.
Installed solar panels, so our electricity bill is virtually zero during spring/summer, but high during winter (£300/month).
We're installing infra red panels, fixing windows, closing doors and wearing jumpers. And many socks.

I’ve lived in two largish very similar sized flats. Both modern builds, well
Insulated etc and same type of building. Both ground floor.
In the one heated by gas, bill was about £1,000 per year.
In the electric only one, over double. It’s absolutely extortionate.

I'd look at solar for the hot water at the very least, if not ground source heating or air source.There are government grants coming out this month I believe.

Obviously this all depends on how much you love the cottage, and how much time and money oua re abe to invest in improving it - but:

Heat pumps (air source) are getting better all the time - if the cottage already has loft insulation and double glazing, it might well be possible to keep a steady background heat with a heat pump and only need to 'top up' with a stove in the evenings. An experienced installer ought to be able to tell you by surveying your cottage and doing the relevan sums.

Heat pumps work most efficiently (so, most cheaply) if running at a lower temp for longer hours - working from home matches that well. You would need to put in (largish) radiators and/or underfloot heating (insulating the floor would probably be a good move anyway - close contact with the ground may explain why it was cool there on a warm day!)

If you plan to be in this property for a long time, and have the means to generate your own electricity (solar/turbine/heat pump) and other sources of heating (solar thermal, multi fuel burner) then it may well be worth looking at staying with electricity.
We've done it as we can tick the above boxes, we wanted to reduce our climate footprint, and we're also protecting ourselves against future fossil fuel price rises. Hopefully.

(oh and you'd need a hot water tank too, but presumably there already is one) You could cut running costs further by installing PV solar panels, you can get a device to divert the free leccy to your hot water tank any time you are not using all the output)

As pps say, ther is currently a government grant (the RHI) for heat pumps, that pays back a little every month, they propose to change that to an up-front cash grant towards the purchase at some point. The installers will know!