Electric heating advise

butterfly022

Hi,
I just bought my new apartment with electric heat. In the rooms panel heater the common area's storage heaters placed currently.
I would like to change them for newer more energy efficient heating system.
I lookedup and what I find is , they have this ATC electric radiators- but even the bigest is not suitable in a room bigger then 18 cubic metres.
Another one is the german electric radiators called Technoterm Lucht Lhz - these are seems to be decent enough.
Please share your experiences with this radiators. Im thinking to change mine to this geman one but I would like to hear some experiences, how much does it cost to run. I would appreciate for any advise.

2011

butterfly022 wrote: »

I would like to change them for newer more energy efficient heating system.

I don't mean to be pedantic but you already have a highly efficient heating system, in fact because it is electric it is almost 100% efficient. Efficiency is the ratio of energy in to energy out expressed as a percentage. With all forms of electric heating almost all of the electrical energy consumed is converted to heat energy. There is only one problem, electricity is very expensive. This means that it would cost less to heat your apartment with a gas boiler that is only 90% efficient than with electric heater that are 100% efficient. The reason for this that gas is far cheaper form of energy than electricity.

So regardless of whether you install the most expensive sophisticated electrical heater or the cheapest the efficiency of the system will be exactly the same regardless of what the salesman will tell you.

Don't worry, all is not lost. Superior control of you electrical heaters can save you money as this prevents overheating of rooms. Obviously there is no benefit in heating a room too much or heating unoccupied rooms, so cutting down on this will save you money without needing to feel cold in your home. A carefully placed temperature sensor placed in each room that regulates temperature of an associated heater that can be controlled by an app on your phone would be one option. The Sonoff devices are very good for this, they are cheap and have no running cost. This allows you to monitor the temperature of your hot water and rooms as well as switch heaters (or other devices) on & off manually or via timers. There is a good thread about them here. There are plenty of other options too, this is just one example that I like.

ercork

If you're home a lot and need the place heated all day long then it is most likely that storage heaters will work out cheaper. On the other hand if you're out at work all day and really only want heating in the evenings you're probably better off going with on demand heaters. As the previous poster said there's not a massive difference between the really expensive ones like Lucht or ATC or cheaper ones like oil filled radiators.

If you're stuck with electricity and are looking for a real alternative check out air to air heat pumps. There are several posts on here about them.

Bruthal

Electric heaters might be 100% efficient at energy conversion. However, end users do pay for the whole process including inefficiencies.