Sorry. Of those who have storage heaters, does anyone have one of those combi jobs with a fan heater or convector attached?
is it more useful than a standard auto? Also daftest question. How does it work? is it possible to use the fan/ convector during the day ? How do they do this? The supply set up on my storage heaters only allows them to come on at night. All power to the heaters is off during the day.
Maybe a bit late in the day but I am thinking of changing my main heaters across the house and having a combi in the sitting room .
They have to have a normal, unswitched, mains connection as well. I suspect they could just be plugged in to a normal socket as it only needs to drive the fan, the heat comes from the core. They could be a combined conventional storeage heater with a conventional fan heater in one box but that strikes me a s bit daft. Why use expensive day rate power when you have heat stored form cheap night rate?
IMHO they need a special dual outlet FCU, which has one multipole switch controlling two separate (day and night) circuits, to enable the appliance to be isolated on all poles with a single switch.
In your humble opinion... but I do take the rather good point point but I can't say I've ever seen such an FCU.
Looking at the storage heaters that TLC have to offer those with built in fan or convector heaters work as two independant heaters in one box rather than just having a fan to cool the core quicker. This probably makes the "single switch isolation" less of an issue as internally you'd have to seperate boxes and thus you'd have to remove two covers to have both set of terminals exposed.
Storage heaters aren't cheap are they? And even the "automatic" ones don't strike me as overly user friendly. The Duoheat system appeals, I'll have to look more closely at that. The cottage is E7 with ancient and huge heaters, that could reaaly do with being upgraded and the Duoheat system seems to offer some solutions to the problems of storage heating.
They used to have them at school ... this would be 1970s/1980s.
A fan assisted storage heater needs a more complex circuit. The heating elements are supplied from a straightforward radial circuit using 4mm2 cable, but the fan requires its own circuit for daytime use. Take a spur from a ring circuit to a fused connection unit that has a 3amp fuse, and run a 1.5mm2 two-core-and-earth cable from the unit for the fan. The heater and fan circuits both terminate at a special dual switch (2) where fan and heater can be isolated simultaneously. Two lengths of heat-resistant flex run from the switch, one to the heater, the other to the fan. A dual switch can be surface-mounted or flush-mounted.
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photo shows two separate switches though. I thought MK made dual circuit FCUs but can't find any by a quick search of the major distributors.
less of an issue perhaps, but The Regs still require a heating appliance to have an isolator for all conductors. I read that as one isolator per appliance, not per element.
The better-insulated ones that use a fan to extract heat from the core at chosen times are cheaper to run but bigger and (even) more expensive
- about £1000
It's a nicely automated way of using peak-rate electricity to mitigate the disadvantages of storage heaters.
Aye downloaded a load of pdfs on them from the TLC site yesterday, read them this morning. I don't like this idea of using peak rate for the "comfort" setting and the "setback" doesn't take it as cool as I would like and "frost" is too low. More research required, I've lived with storage heating before and know the problems but I believe a storage heater with timed and room stat controlled automatic output it should be possible to mitigate the cold evening syndrome. Having enough input when the weather changes is tricky though as one can't predict the future. Going the other way with the weather getting warming decent insulation would mean the heat stays in the core rather than leaking out and superheating the room.
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