Indeed.
His name was Alex <east european sounding surname> and is, or was an adviser to the dept of climate change.
he was spouting the usual impossible nonsense that we need to stop heating houses with gas and use 'efficient' electricity instead.
One of the presenters reminded him that her nan heated her house with storage heaters which he dismissed as 'inefficient'.
Surely all forms of direct electric heating is 100% efficient ?.
They are inefficient compared to a heat pump system. Unless you use them to cool the house in the (globally warmed) summer.
They can have different efficacy to the task.
A storage heater gone cold when you need the heat, isn't that good at storage no matter how 100% efficient the heating element is.
Wait till the whole town is heated by air source heatpumps and its so cold outside that they stop working!
Network Rail painted some of the rails white during the summer to reduce heating. Does this mean they are made colder in mid winter?
I'd argue that storage heaters aren't. Yes they are 100% efficient at converting electricity into heat, but some of that heats escapes when it is not needed, raising the temperature of an already warm or unoccupied house and that heat then slowly escapes from the house, so it has served no purpose.
Electric fires on the other hand need only be turned on when heat is actually required, so are 100% efficient.
SteveW
It will be UK humidity making them ice up that does for them. Air source still used to work fairly well in Japanese continental winters - that are mostly about as cold as in the UK but very very dry.
Not by much. Painting them white reduces the heating from incoming solar radiation but it makes very little difference to outgoing thermal radiation. To a very good approximation any paint that isn't a metallic mirror finish is pretty much black in the thermal IR band.
There are now a handful of designer meta-materials that will cool when placed in direct sunlight. They are mirrors for visible and near IR light and almost perfectly black in the thermal IR band so that they radiate heat away faster than they can absorb it from sunlight.
Depends on how you measure the efficiency... If your storage heater keeps the house nice and toasty all day while you are at work, and then runs out of puff when you actually want it, then from a usage point of view, you might argue that is not very efficient.
That was my recollection of them from my childhood.
My parents were early adopters of "economy 7" electric storage heaters in the "electricity too cheap to meter" sales pitch era. They were huge ugly over priced boxes of firebricks that got insanely hot in the middle of the night and heated the unoccupied house by day nicely with no-one in it. Then when you got home in the evening there was barely anything left so you had to use the electric fire as well to stay warm.
I guess they wouldn't have sold so many if they had named them "expensive ineffective 7" which was more of an accurate description.
Electric storage heating has to be designed into a well insulated building if it is to stand any chance of being reasonably effective.
We have an office with one of them installed. THe heat doesnt last the whole day. At this time of the year it is hard to judge whether or not to leave them on as a hot day will have all the windows open
Well I suppose you get a bit of 50 Hz electromagnetic radiation, unless you use DC.
An old manager of mine (sort of) built his own house in the very early
70's, he had a builder do the shell then project managed the other trades, and IIRC did the plumbing and electrics himself. Being an outstanding scientist, it was as well insulated and draft-proofed as was possible in those days. He had a central "economy 7" store of some sort, and then an air ducted system. (Remember that E7 electricity was *very* cheap in those days, before North Sea gas). My recollection is that he didn't need supplementary heating, but he probably over-sized the store. It was built into the side of a hill too, so it had a favourable volume to exposed area ratio.
There again it depends. A convector heater warms the *air*, making it
*feel* warmer. A radiative heater warms the *walls*, which may or may not be better. Thin walls, and you lose the heat to the outside. Thick (or well insulated walls) may take a long time to warm up.
Yes. Is why a painted rad or towel rail is better than a chrome one.
We had one that our secretary seemed to be in constant battle with. Its behaviour didn't follow expectations at all. In the end it was discovered that somehow the factory controlling the power feed had managed to change the "on" time to part of the day.
Chris
For a few months in the early 70s I lived on site at Fiddler's Ferry. The accommodation was in wooden temporary buildings (Terrapin, I think).
Each small room had a storage heater. A low mass building, with doubtful insulation. IIRC, the heaters had no adjustability, just on/off, so the only way to cope if you had got it wrong was to open the windows. I wasn't there in the depths of winter.
I guess that the power taken on site was probably provided free by the then CEGB.
Chris
But you don't need to heat the house, just the people, who are basically sacks of salty water. Microwaves!
Cheers
Wouldn't it be good to differentiate between efficiency in the technical sense and as it is commonly used?
Ugly bags of mostly water. ;-)
Are we going back to Radium handwarmers again?
Owain
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