I think you need to speak to a heating engineer on what are your best options. It is possible, of course, to run a gas system off propane tanks - but I have no idea of the cost of propane whole-house heating.
Well that sums it up really without mains gas or space for an oil/gas tank. You are stuck with electricity.
Probably not as you are home most of the time so a heater would be on most of the time...
Might be worth taking weekly meter readings and see how much of each day/night energy you are using. Having real usage figures is the only way to be sure of getting the best deal. Bear in mind that with the current cold weather usage will be high, so be a bit cautious about basing tariff decisions on just a week or threes consumption. Your day use probably won't vary much winter/summer, perhaps a kw or so per day, but the night use will go from nothing to lots...
It would keep Drivel happy.
middle of
(usually
Same here but these days I think you can get storage heaters that have far better controls. ie more than a bimetal strip activated vent and manual heat in/out knobs. Things like external thermostats, timers, fan assisted boost, etc now where does one go these days to see or find out proper information about these things. In the olde dayes one would go to your local electricity showroom but they don't exist anymore...
I've never lived in a house with storage heaters, but what Kev says about them is very logical and I can believe it 100%. A very stupid idea IMHO.
The best use of Economy 7 would probably be to use it to charge up batteries overnight, and then use the batteries to supply power as and when required during the day. Unfortunately, while such an installation is perfectly possible, the capital cost would be pretty horrendous, and I doubt you would recoup the cost in saved electric bills over the lifetime of the installation.
Of course, if you *did* have such an installation, you could also use other sources to charge the batteries such as wind and solar power. My gut feeling is that you would still not succeed in saving anything over the lifetime of the installation, but I have not worked the numbers.
When cheap high-density batteries are invented, it could however be a very attractive way to go.
Cos they didn't tell me about the alternatives
It is when you don't use it and it is obvious from the bills that you dont
Ouch - 20 seems insane.
For some "overseas comparison", ours averages out to around 6.75 cents/ kWH each month - so around 4.5p. I'm not yet awake enough this morning to try and tweak that as a proportion of average income, which would probably paint a fairer picture :-)
cheers
Jules
It would have to be a pretty big battery, to deliver several thousand watts over 16 hours or so. Perhaps you can convert the garage into one giant battery.
Off-peak electricity might be best used to pump water uphill, then use that to drive a hydro-electric unit. But there are a few problems with domestic use (such as having a big enough hill in the garden).
Not *that* big. A normal car battery will store around 1kWH. So the number of car batteries needed will be the same as the number of units of electricity you want to store per day. Obviously in practice you would use much higher capacity cells - but it gives you an idea of the sort of size involved. I bet you could fit quite a few car batteries into a small garden shed.
It would probably be the most cost-effective to buy (or make) open cells with removable plates (such as "fish tank" style batteries), and to clean the tanks (cells) and reform the plates yourself as the cells lose capacity. Maintainance will then be a very low cost. Otherwise you will have the major capital outlay of buying a new set of batteries every 4 or 5 years.
And the storage volume needed would be a tad more than for batteries!
The fundamental problem with the UK was a lack of insulation until very recently, and often high air changes per hour.
Gas central heating was the only way of getting sufficient kW into the house at low unit cost, consider gas at 2.4p inc VAT vs Economy 7 at
5p & peak at 10p, it is as they say a "no-brainer". Economy 7 was an atrocious kludge - totally inadequate kW, huge thermal losses from the usual obsession of double glazing but no loft insulation, no wall insulation, and high air changes per hour from coal era vents & open flues. It translated into freezing by 7pm (or 2pm as often as not!). Economy 7 was a lead balloon sold as a parachute, it had no chance of warming the thermal mass of uninsulated building fabric.Now insulate properly.
A 2009 build with a cheap build can have peak-rate panel heaters and get away with it (working couple away most of the day, heat set to background), a better build will have say economy-7 & peak-rate Duoheats (better for stay-at-home retirees). Insulation really does turn the tables; gas becomes expensive re install, maintenance, costly system flushes & boiler replacement with unknown boiler life, idiot installers, single point of failure.
A 1920 build on exposed coastal hill, mixed cavity & solid wall, with celotex 25+25mm insulation throughout, 50+50mm in living area, 300mm celotex in loft, 75mm underfloor. Before the insulation GCH did not perform well, and finally froze in 2009 winter. Fully insulated Economy 7 was installed and works superbly - commercial fan storage heaters (not the domestic fan stuck on the bottom type) and standard automatic type. Peak rate heaters (Calortec bought in France for =A330 in 2008 summer) have not been used this winter.
A storage heater is a high thermal mass & continuous temperature body, which is actually ideal if you insulate on the inside of a house because it puts back the thermal mass lost - it provides a constant temperature thermal mass.
Unfortunately, all is not roses with high insulation & electric heating. I still say a living area needs a radiant gas fire as a focal point and direct radiative heating (and most preferably balanced flue). I still say UK storage heaters are the cheap crap, USA & Germany get proper commercial fan storage heaters branded AEG, Miele, etc. They leak next to nothing, they only pump heat out by a fan which is controlled by a wall mounted thermostat. Thus they are never too hot or too cold, never run out when you get home, hold 40% of their heat by midnight the next day so you never overcharge, no throwing windows open because it is too hot. The downside is they are 2-2.5x as expensive (3.4kWhr x7 is =A3800, 6.7-8.0kWhr x7 is =A31300 - but they are huge capacities). The upside is they avoid any single point of failure, there is no maintenance cost re monthly D/D or boiler replacement to save for, they last 25yrs etc, they are made in Germany.
With very high levels of insulation GCH is an expensive white elephant, electric heating can give better control. It is not however easy to achieve such levels of insulation in the UK because it lagged much of the world for decades, ridiculously. It could have required
25mm minimum polystyrene on all walls since 1970, instead it threw gas at the solution - both for electricity generation (rather than nukes) and for domestic heating.
It would probably be cheaper in the long term to get rid of E7 and buy a mobile gas heater and a bottle of gas.
We still have the heater and one and a half bottles of gas but haven't had to use them for over ten years.
adequately. In a home that is unoccupied during working hours on week days, a 15 Kg bottle will last about 2 weeks in midwinter (depending on the room insulation).
A 15Kg re-fill costs a bit under £30 today. So you will be spending about £60 per month to heat your living room.
We qualify for a grant towards a boiler but it would have taken so long to get it we had a new one fitted when the old one finally died. The installer recommended one of these
Any chance of a supplier or model name/range name so I can have a look?
It is horrific and likely to be where we get to within about 10yrs. We have a lot of wind farms to pay for remember... plus their backup generating plant (!), plus if we DO move to electric cars and we DO see 200dpb oil then we will need a significant upgrade to the electrical distribution infrastructure as people move off oil etc. True electric rechargeable cars would be a nightmare because the grid is simply not designer for such - including the diversity assumed at the consumer end re N houses to N 400A supply.
The uncertainty is gas, although LNG has removed a potential catastrophe there we are still reliant on European & Russian pipelines. We have too many gas fired power plants due to cheap north sea gas, we needed nuclear a long time ago - CANDU systems are a world away from Chernobyl.
Very cheap hence the "electric baseboard heating" in both USA (& Canada), plus countries have an installed "base" of houses with far superior levels of insulation to the UK although somewhat negated by colder temperatures and larger dwellings.
My monthly gas direct debit payment, currently stands at £56.00 - and that is for a 3-bed detached house, full central heating throughout, abundant hot water and gas cooking. I'm also currently running a positive balance at that payment and my supplier (Atlantic Gas and Electricity) as a loyalty bonus, also refunds one month's gas and electricity payments every November (nice for Christmas!).
As we are both retired, the central heating comes on at 6 am every morning and stays on until 10 pm at night.
£60 per month to heat a single room, with additional costs for heating water and cooking sounds horrendous!
I recommended it as a standby in case of emergencies. The OP has a storage heater and E7 he is using for that ATM
I certainly agree with you in relation to insulation. After we had cavity wall insulation put in some years ago we noticed a huge difference in our CH bills. Once the radiators had brought the house up to temperature they would shut down and stay off for a far longer period before needing to come on again - simply because the heat they had created stayed within the house and was not lost through the walls.
Anyone who has cavity walls and has not had them filled with insulation is wasting money. It doesn't cost a lot to have it done - and the savings are considerable.
Yes, that was exactly what I was illustrating.
A portable butane gas heater is however very handy for heating a room very quickly. It may well therefore be cost effective for a working family to use it for 20 minutes or so to heat a room in the morning between getting out of bed and going to work instead of setting the CH to start up an hour before rising and using energy to heat the entire system.
It will also make the room run with condensation.
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