Would you buy a house heated by storage heaters?

[IloveStaceySolomon]

Found a lovely house, good location, layout works for our family, but is has no gas and is heated by old-fashioned storage heaters, so has a very low EPC rating. We currently have full gas central heating in our existing house, rated EPC C. I'm worried about the energy costs. Would it be unreasonable to ask to see some bills? Would storage heaters put you off? I know I could get gas laid on and fit radiators but buying the house would leave us no budget to do this.

Are you buying it with some cash for work? Air source heat pump is a viable option for lots if properties, and probably better in the long run than a boiler would be. If youre intending to replace flooring (so could insulate the sub floor and have under floor heating), and the walls are or could be insulated, then Id probably go for it.

If youre at the top of your budget then its not a great buy.

If you can get it changed to your preference of heating and they are willing to drop the price, that’s a wonderful outcome.

is this house going to be your forever home?

tge way the government is trying to push us away from gas central heating, it really is time to have a rethink on how we heat our homes.

Would solar panels be an answer and have electric heaters.

I have a friend whos house is like a furnace, the bathroom radiator is 300watts, they have 500watt wall mounted heaters in the bedrooms, two 500watt wall mounted heaters in the living room, and a single bar 250watt in the kitchen. They have solar panels on the roof, they also have an electric car (Renault Zoe). They have worked out how to store excess electric in lorry batteries too, but if you read any caravan or boat magazine there are articles in that too.

basically, you need solar panels and an 8kw windmill off of eBay, storing in batteries then running into an inverter (makes 240 electric), televisions, fridges, etc all can be 12volt which won’t draw as much electricity.

They’re nuts, you have to turn them on the night before guessing what it’s going to be like tomorrow.

if it turns out warm tomorrow you’ll be opening the windows to get rid of the heat. Plus electric heating is 3x the price of gas.

knock them down by £25k so you can install an oil fired system if there’s no gas.

We did this too. Has the advantage over central heating that we only heat the rooms we need to. So my home office is heated in the say but not the evenings but the living room is heated from late afternoon through the evening. Right now we only have the shower room heated at the time we shower but in the rest of the house the heating is off.

Just going to leave this here in case it is of use to op or anyone finding this thread
https://www.cse.org.uk/advice/night-storage-heaters/

In a flat where you may have the chance to also benefit passively from other flats being heated (so on a floor up any levels from the ground floor), possibly. Otherwise they're not good for damp at all, and when I have had the experience with them, this was in one of the driest counties in the UK (and still damp).

In a house - no. A wood burner might do something if no revamp opportunity, but usually only in one room or on one floor.

What about electricity/forced air/underfloor heating? (NOT oil-filled electrical radiators or baseboard heaters, which are also very inefficient and expensive to run).

That’s the norm in much of Canada…

Also make sure you work out why central heating hasn't been put in. I looked at a house in a terrace in a village in Devon a few years ago, and realised that there wasn't anywhere to put an oil tank and the village wasn't on the gas mains, so there just wasn't a way of installing central heating. There are rules about how close to a house an oil tank can be, and the oil tanker has to be able to get access to fill it. They used to be able to put the hose through the house, but they're not allowed to do that anymore.

Storage heaters would put me right off. They use off-peak electricity, usually on a dual tariff like Economy 7. However, in my experience they're still expensive to run. By the evening, at the time when you want to sit down and relax, they've run low on heat anyway so you need to plug in additional heaters - and those would be using peak rate electricity.

When you're on a dual tariff, your peak rate charges are much higher than for houses that use a single tariff, so you need to avoid using electricity between the hours of (approximately) 6.00am and midnight.

Only if it was a small flat Not a family house

I would, but that's because any house I'd buy now I'd be thinking about changing the heating system to a heat pump anyway.