Electric central heating coating almost £10p/h

[Izzy665246]

So our whole flat runs on electric central heating. We have never used the central heaying before because it’s too expensive. We have a 3 month old now so we obviously need to start using it so she can be warm. But having trialled it yesterday and putting it on for less that an hour, it cost almost £10 😲 is it just me or is this crazy. I know prices have jumped but dear god, £10 for an hour of heating just seems ridiculously extortionate

The first hour will be expensive because you're heating up a cold flat. Once the place is warm it'll cut in and out to maintain the heat and that will cost much less. I can't believe it's costing you £10 per hour. Are you sure you've got that right?

When you say you have electric central heating do you have radiators on the walls or is it what a lot of modern places seem to have — a heating/ cooling system, like an aircon unit, high up on the wall? Those are ridiculously expensive to run and not at all efficient.

Try turning off the radiators in rooms where you don't need heat and shutting the doors. A recent BBC Radio 4 programme revealed that the cheapest form of electric heating is plug-in oil-filled radiators which, once the room is warm, are pennies an hour to run. You might want to buy a couple of those and use them to heat the two most-used rooms.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dxtx

Electric heating is expensive.

That said ...

You used £10 in 1 hour. Divide that by 0.35 to get the kW, which works out to be about 28.5 kW as your heating power rating.

That is a lot. For comparison about 11 kW will get my 3 bed semi from 12 to 17 degrees in 1 hour. In the same time you have used 3x as much energy, on probably a smaller space. And your electric energy will probably be 20% more efficient than my gas.

If you really are using that much it probably makes a lot more sense to move onto an Economy 7 tariff and heat the place a little over during the cheap tariff period and let it cool down a bit during the day.

Yes it’s radiators on the walls. I have a smart meter so turned everything off except for the heating and it cost us £10 as we have a smart pay as you go meter so I could see exactly how much it would cost us. We do have a convector heater in the bedroom for at night that stays on long enough just to take the chill off the room but again, just this one heater being plugged in is almost £2 an hour. I’ll have a read of that article, thank you!

there is an economy 7 meter in our cupboard but it seems to only be connected to the storage heater in our living room which is useless and hardly produces any heat. We rent so I have asked the landlord if he’d be willing to change the boiler as ours seems extremely old and inefficient but he said it will be too expensive. But us paying for using that boiler is becoming too expensive! We are looking at moving but in the current climate and living on the Isle of Wight there’s not much around, so we’re stuck here for now. But I do agree, the £10 seems incredibly high. I’ll constant the landlord again. Fingers crossed he can do something

Problem is that prepayment tariffs are higher than dd. I don't know by how much. DD is £0.35 per kWh.

E7 applies to the whole house surely, not just one radiator. Do you have two different meters ?

You say the whole house uses electric CH, but then you talk about "boilers". Electric CH does not use a boiler.

You need to find out what tariff you are on. If you have E7 and it applies to the entire house you can save probably quite a bit by heating the house at night.

We have an electric boiler having looked in the cupboard. By a company called Aztec by the looks of things. I’ll have to speak to the landlord about the e7. 33.26kw ph is our current tariff

When you're looking for somewhere to move to, look for property with an EPC rating of at A, B or C. Anything lower than that is likely to cost a lot to heat. Gas central heating is the cheapest way to heat a house/ have hot water. A modern combi-boiler will be cheaper. And double-glazing makes a difference too. I know there isn't a lot of choice in the rental market and I wish there was more pressure on landlords to bring their properties up to a reasonable specification.

In the meantime get a couple of these
www.screwfix.com/c/heating-plumbing/oil-filled-radiators/cat7230008
and heat one or two rooms.

Remember that lots of us here grew up in the days before central heating was common and were put to bed with hot water bottles and scraped ice off the inside of our windows, and we survived.

That's a fairly average tariff. You say you have electric radiators and then you say you have storage heaters. Which is it?

Older storage heaters are a nightmare in terms of efficiency, but of course if they've been turned off and then you turn them on they'll have a huge demand to start with.

There are normal radiators and then one random storage heater in the living room

Example

plug in, oil filled, free standing radiators will be cheaper. Family/friends probably have spare ones kicking around that you could borrow. I have a couple in my loft from pre CH. I keep in case there's a problem with my gas at anytime, but I'd happily lend them out if someone needed them.

You can't be 33p for the economy 7 rate. That should be lower.

The problem with e7 is that the rest of your electric is more expensive so you need to be running as much on it as possible on the cheap rate.

Get the full details of your tariff and then compare it to others.

We have economy 10 which gives the cheap hours 4.30am to 7.30am, 1.30pm to 4.30pm and then 8.30pm to 12.30am.

I am 12.5p a kWh for the cheap rate but 55p for the expensive rate. All showers and heating have to be on the lower one and washing machine, dishwasher etc are always run within those times.

You might be better with an E10 rate but not many suppliers do it.

The storage heater will be using 7 hours each day so if it's a big one that could be several pounds a day. If it's not working effectively for you turn it off.

I prefer economy 10 as they get a boost in the afternoon so are kicking out good heat in the evening when I need it..

Can you find the kWh rating of your boiler? Useful article here which gives the rough kWh needed to run a different number of radiators using an electric boiler. For annual costs they are only using 15p per kWh in their calculations though.

According to the article a 9kwH boiler should run 7 radiators. Multiply the kWh rating by your tariff of 33.26p per kWh by 9kwh boiler gives £2.99/hour. That’s if it’s running flat out for an hour, once your flat is up to temperature it should switch off.

Do you have an immersion tank heating your hot water separately perhaps?

It could be that your smart meter has the wrong tariff programmed into it - my Dad’s had this problem and was telling him he was spending more than he was.

wisetradesmen.com/electric-boiler-running-costs-and-prices-cost-of-running-an-electric-combi-boiler/

There is an immersion but we keep this switched off as it’s too expensive. It all seems so complicated. I’ll just have to speak to our landlord until he either puts in a more efficient boiler or we’ll have to move

Thank you everyone for your advice!!

All electric heaters are equally efficient. No matter how expensive or how old, they are, they all turn 1kWh of electrical energy into 1kWh of heat energy.

If the owner of this home provides only electric heating, he will be used to tenants giving notice as soon as they see their first winter's bills.

We’ve been here two and a half years. In previous years we’ve just wrapped up warm and used plug in heaters instead. But with baby it’s not an option anymore. Hopefully this will be our last winter here!

P.s.

I'd get an oil-filled electric raduator, about 1kW or 1500W, for the baby's room, and maybe an 800W for your own. Turn the thermostat down to a modest temperature. An electric blanket is very cheap to run. Use a thermometer, especially for the baby's room

Air the house every morning to reduce damp.

Damp will make the house feel colder, and encourage mould.

Do whatever you can to avoid the damp caused by drying wet washing indoors. If you must, put a line or rack in the bathroom, turn on the extractor fan, and leave the door and window SHUT. Electricity usage by a fan is negligible and it will take the water vapour outside and prevent it spreading round your home.

Damp is more unhealthy than cold.

A heat pump dryer (not a condenser) is cheap to run but expensive to buy.

Phone your electric company and ask what tariff you are on.

Do you have one metre reading or two?

Older smart metres were notoriously inaccurate for E7.

If you are on E7 then you are paying more for peak electric. This makes no sense unless you are using your storage heaters and running appliances at night.

Basically you are not using the cheap electric and running everything on the expensive rate (which will be higher than a standard rate to offset the cheap bit).

Thanks for posting the pictures. You seem to have ordinary 'wet' radiators that are fed from a hot water tank and then some kind of storage heater. So the storage heater is really the only one that's an electric radiator. That one is presumably designed to charge overnight on the Economy7 tariff and release heat during the day, and your hot water tank should also be timed to heat up on Economy7 too. I'm furious on your behalf because it's about the least efficient way of heating a property there is.

Echo what's been said by Calmdown14. You're on the E7 tariff because of one storage heater, but that makes it far more expensive for you to run everything else in your house during the day. You would do better to change back to an ordinary tariff and use an oil-filled radiator in the room where the storage heater is. Good luck.

Thank you so much everyone. We have invested in a couple oil filled radiators and changed to normal tariff instead of the e7

I expect the 1 random Quantum storage heater will have been fitted to get the epc higher. If you check the epc it will have the main heating as High Heat retention heater. Electric boilers score very badly

Yes I looked at the EPC and we are on a low E 😬 the star ratings for the heating and insulation were both 1 star too. Baby was unplanned so we had no intentions of having a baby here so didn’t think the poor heating would bother us and we’d find ways around it. But with baby girl here now, keeping her warm is our main priority!

I n the past some landlords could set their own tariff for their tennants.

An EPC rating of E is the legal minimum for rental properties. So while it's not great, it does mean your landlord is meeting requirements.