Storage Heaters (vs Gas radiators)

_Kaiser_

Hey all,

So I'm currently looking at apartments to rent and it seems that many of them have storage heaters rather than gas-heated radiators - even newish ones

I've never lived in a place with these things and know nothing about them other than people advising me to stay away because they cost a fortune to run.

Are they really that bad? It's making the search a lot harder as otherwise ideal apartments have to be ruled out

Cheers

xhiler8ion

This is my first year using storage heaters, so I might be doing it wrong, but here are my results this year for a reference:

Monthly electric bills
May - September: €47 - €60
December/January: €120

So I estimate it is costing me €60 - €70 a month to heat my place (c. 65 sqm, I work from home so it needs to be tolerable pretty much 24 hours/day) at the coldest time of year. (That's ignoring that i don't know my BER, might be cooking more hot meals or running the dehumidifier/dryer more because i can't hang my clothes out on the line in the winter, etc).

How does that compare to the cost of running rads? I'd love to know as I'm contemplating a move myself!

John T Carroll

xhiler8ion wrote: »

This is my first year using storage heaters, so I might be doing it wrong, but here are my results this year for a reference:

Monthly electric bills
May - September: €47 - €60
December/January: €120

So I estimate it is costing me €60 - €70 a month to heat my place (c. 65 sqm, I work from home so it needs to be tolerable pretty much 24 hours/day) at the coldest time of year. (That's ignoring that i don't know my BER, might be cooking more hot meals or running the dehumidifier/dryer more because i can't hang my clothes out on the line in the winter, etc).

How does that compare to the cost of running rads? I'd love to know as I'm contemplating a move myself!

Say €65/month to heat 65 M2 is €2.15/Day. I use about 8.5 Ltrs/day of kerosene (oil fired non condensing boiler) to heat 122 M2. 8.5 ltrs of Kero at €0.65/litre is €5.53/day or it would cost 65/122*5.53 or €2.94 to heat 65M2 so you are doing OK I'd say. Looking at it another way, assuming your off peak elect. cost @ €0.09/Kwh then you are using 24 Kwh/day (2.15/0.09).
which equates to 15.4 watts/M2/hr (24*1000/65/24) which is an excellent (low) consumption.
Had a quick look at Bonkers.ie (couldnt remember the name last night) and gas costs seen to be around €0.06/Kwh which would equate to €0.067/Kwh assuming a condensing boiler of 90% efficiency. This means your daily cost on gas would be €1.61/day. You can do the rest of the sums yourself.

John T Carroll

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

Hey all,

So I'm currently looking at apartments to rent and it seems that many of them have storage heaters rather than gas-heated radiators - even newish ones

I've never lived in a place with these things and know nothing about them other than people advising me to stay away because they cost a fortune to run.

Are they really that bad? It's making the search a lot harder as otherwise ideal apartments have to be ruled out

Cheers

The biggest problem with older type storage heaters is that they are NOT (storage heaters) as they leak out so much heat constantly that by the time you come home from work in the evening they are practically cold or very cool so you either have to boost up the heat with full price electricity or use some other form of auxiliary heating. Some of the modern ones are probably a good bit better but its very hard to get actual numbers from the manufacturers. I wouldn't rule them out completely though, a lot depends on the BER rating of the Apartment/house, if its anything like XHiler8ion's below then you wont need much heat anyway. I know of a few people in Apartments and they have quite modest bills and have very comfortable "homes", the storage heaters I've seen there are reasonably new, maybe 6 to 8 years old. You may care to post the make/model of any that you see in Apartments that you are interested in and someone can tell you if they have intelligent controls etc.