No central heating - electric/oil-filled radiators?

[BlueRaspberry7]

We've owned our home for 3 years and the boiler has packed in. It's an old one - the gas engineer showed us the inside and it's crusted and rusted up. The heating here was never great tbh. The radiators in several rooms didn't work despite checking and bleeding them. It's a weird system, that goes up through a flue in the attic or something.

It will cost around £5k to buy and fit a new boiler. In the meantime we've bought some small plug-in radiators for the lounge and kids' bedrooms, that are doing a good job.

My question is: is it worth the money for new boiler if:

a) not planning on selling the house any time soon and
b) can just plug in more freestanding radiators as needed when the temp drops?

Has anyone else made this change? If so, have your electricity bills gone so high you may as well have installed the boiler?

Is switching from gch to electric heating it an economic / eco-efficient and eco-friendly plan or a bad one?

We loved for 15 years with electric heaters/gas radiators and no central heating.

When we finally bit the bullet and installed gas central heating, we noticed a significant reduction in our bills. We also had a quality of life that we didn't know we'd been missing.

My advice would be to fix your boiler asap.

The cheapest way to get warm with electricity is with aircon. Small free standing radiators are ok-ish when seasons change and it is not the biting cold yet. They might take hours to warm a room to decent temperatures, sometimes it is like 1 degree per hour.
Do yourself an early Christmas present. It is your house, you will be living there for years. But do shop around. 5k seems a lot.

@Meem321 thanks for your advice. When you say quality of life, can I check what you mean.

Was the house never really cosy and warm without ghc? Are you also talking about drying the washing, or anything else? And would that be in the winter, or all through the year? thanks.

If new boiler is financial stretch, consider electric blankets.
DH is always complaining about being hot, lives in a t-shirt all year long, I am always cold, especially when sitting on sofa reading or watching television. DH really struggles when house is warmer, so I keep the thermostat lower than I would like, because I can add layers, he can’t get comfortable without opening a window.
The electric blanket changed my life.

I personally love central heating.

i grew up in a terraced house and we used to light the fire in the middle room to try and heat the whole house. We had condensation etc etc.

our first terraced house, we had oil filled radiators and the electric meter was like a hungry hippo, and we used to light fires too.

we have central heating now, with the best environmentally friendly radiators. Our house is toasty toasty, and our gas bill is tiny -,£10pw - we also have a gas shower which is something else.

i have an account which I stash money away for the boiler, washing machine, fridge and freezer, as well as my car. I don’t want to live without these ever again.

If electric heating is working for you, why change it, but 1kwh of electricity in my house is 33p, so 3 radiators on at a low ish setting of 1kw x 3 is £1 an hour. It’s not cheap, although I have a 250watt single bar fire in the cellar packed beautifully for emergencies which is a unit 33p every four hours

What about hot water? We can heat ours either with electric or from the gas boiler, if we don’t use the boiler then the electricity bill is absolutely huge.

You can try and estimate how much it will cost to heat your house with electric radiators by looking at your gas usage in kWh over the past year. Electricity is a bit more efficient than gas and your boiler was old, so it might only take 75% of the gas usage. Multiply this number of kWh by the price you pay for each kWh of electricity (the capped rate is about 26.35p).

For example, we used 14,500 kWh of gas for heating and hot water last year. On the year's rates this would cost about £900 in gas. The figure for electricity (assuming only 75% of the amount is needed) is around £2800.

This was going to be my question. You really don't want to be dependent on an immersion heater. Watch your meter when it's switched on (assuming that's what you have).

I wouldn't be without gas central heating either tbh.

Have you got a smart meter?
pre covid we rented a house without central heating. It cost us 300 a month in electric. That barely kept it above 10 in winter. That first bill was a shock.
i would expect it to be at least double that now.

beg, borrow, steal for the boiler.

Get a new boiler asap. Or, if your house is suitable, you could look into a heat pump.

Do not rely on other forms of electric heating - it is so much more expensive than gas.

A heat pump will be fairly useless with old radiators that are probably undersized. We have them but if you are counting the £, they aren’t cheap if you need to fit suitable rads. In the circumstances I’d go with gas.

Perfect analysis, thanks for sharing.

Yes we’re using an immersion heater for water, this is all very helpful thanks.

Heating with gas is roughly a third of the cost of using electric. You will probably cover the cost of a new boiler within a couple of years and it will make your house easier to sell when you sell it.

It eliminated the dampness in the house and we no longer needed to rush to get dressed in the morning or gather round a tiny radiator. We had a tumble drier for clothes.

Immediately soon heaters are a expensive to run. In the long run it will be cheaper to get a new boiler as well as more comfortable for you all but just before Xmas is tough. Th oil filled radiators are fine now but they won't cut the mustard come January and February.

I had an oil boiler that packed up and ancient radiators, house was never warm. I got a grant for electric storage heaters and took out a government loan for solar panels and battery storage. It’ll be my first winter but bills so far have been ok and house is much warmer.

This kind of happened to me in winter - the boiler broke and I had to wait a month for it to be replaced. Some things :

As everyone says, electric is about 3x the cost of gas, so if you heat your house to the same level then you will pay 3x as much.

Electric is more controllable in the respect you can turn off rooms more easily and direct heat to where it is actually needed.

A lot of houses don't have the wiring to be able to deal with a lot of powerful electric heaters plugged in simultaneously. You might trip the breakers out if you overload the rings, or at worst melt the wires.

If your gas boiler breaks and you can't get hot water if you have a hot water cylinder you should have an immersion heater fitted which will hopefully enable you to still get hot water for baths/showers.

For me the key to keeping warm without busting the bank was just heating one room (the room we were in) and using things like heated blankets on the bed to keep the beds warm and of course heated throws and extra clothing. It isn't really that bad.

Longer term I think the major problem would be keeping the entire house up to a reasonable level to avoid pipes freezing and mould during cold snaps while not bankrupting yourself with electric bills. The whole thing would probably be a lot easier to do if you were on the south coast rather than in the middle of the highlands of Scotland.

Agree, we have recently had a heat pump installed, the house is warmer and the bills are lower. Would never go back to gas.

3k is a pretty good price, put it on a 0% credit card.

I think it would cost a lot more in the long run and the weather has been very mild this year so you might not feel the same when it's minus degrees outside. Are you eligible for any government schemes to help with a new boiler?

A lot of boiler installation companies will allow you to pay in installments