Changing from old storage heaters to modern electric off economy 7

[backtoschoolsnot]

Am about to move to a flat that has all electric heating (no gas to property) but the storage heaters are the big old style ones.

I've been looking at changing the heaters from an aesthetic perspective and it would seem that now that it's more cost effective to get electric heaters off economy 7, even allowing for electric water heating.

Has anyone done this - how disruptive and expensive is it?

Have you looked at dimplex quantum storage heaters? I've been looking into them and they seem very good. Some colleagues have recommended them to me and they're very happy with them, apparently.

They're very well insulated, operate on a programmable timer for when they release the heat, and also have a peak rate fan heater so you can still use them for heat if you do run out of the over night stored heat. That way you would still benefit from a lower cost night rate electric for the majority of the heat.
They also monitor what you use over the preceeding few days and use that to work out how much heat they should charge up with each night.

I looked at just standard single rate heaters and coming off E7, but because almost all of our electric is use the storage heaters it would be significantly more expensive for us to lose the discounted night rate.

Some points.

i) Economy 7 I think is a tariff. So independent of your heater type. If you have storage heaters you should really be on an E7 tariff already because the whole idea of storage heaters is you store the energy when the electricity is cheap and release it over a longer period when it is expensive.

ii) I doubt whether fitting new "non storage" electric heaters would be that expensive. Simply remove the storage heater then mount the new one in its place. It is possible though if the new heaters use more power you might need some upgrades to the electric wiring and fusebox which could bump up the price.

iii) Not sure that an E7 tariff would be sensible with normal (non storage) electric heaters. With normal electric heaters you are not trying to store energy, the heat comes out straight as you switch them on. Normally people don't have the heating on at night (when the E7 tariff is active) so there might not be much point to this. It all depends whether you are exchanging old storage heaters for new non storage heaters or old storage heaters for new storage heaters.