Electric heating

This is one company that supply them fischerfutureheat.com/

Very pricey from that company and there are many cheaper second hand units of that same make on ebay

My friend has one, she is pleased with it but lives in a purpose-built eco house which needs very little heating

Electric would be useful but only with extremely good house insulation

My sister has only storage heaters but they are linked to full solar panels and a big battery array. They work fine

I found lots on ebay, mis-spelt and called fisher. 3 new cost £7000 and can be bought for a bit under £2000

Fischer Future Heat are a bit of a racket and are not recommended. I do not mean to suggest any criminality, but I understand that they go in for hard selling, a bit like double glazing salesmen used to be.

Electric heating is very expensive to run. Using electricity rather than gas could double your fuel bills, especially as you live in an old terraace house. If you are a mid terrace house you would need to have the two external walls insualated, probably internally, maximum insulation in your loft and full double, preferably triple glazing to make electricity anywhere near gas prices.

If you did go for electricity the simplets cheapest wayof doing it would be to go out and buy electric radiators for each room and plug them into a socket using a timer plug.

Gas is going to be around for a long time yet. We have just bought an old house where the boiler has been condemned and disconnected and now we are in the house we can see the condition of the rusty randomly sized and distributed radiators, which all date to the 1970/80s are such that the way forward is to strip the whole heating system out and start from scratch - and we are going for a new gas central heating system. In an old house I can see no affordable alternative.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with your gas system, but perhaps looking further at getting that fixed would be the better option.

As Jaxjacky says - get a gas engineer to come out, look at it and give you an estimate. Far, far cheaper than installing a new system

If I remember rightly, that particular heating company is (or was) very closely linked to the worst ever energy company I have ever had the misfortune to do business with. I wouldn't touch anything linked to them with a bargepole.

Moving away from a flat some years back with electric heating to one with gas central heating was a massive relief. Horribly expensive and not nearly as efficient and controllable as gas.

Personally, I would avoid electric heating like the plague.

Avoid Fischer products, so very expensive and there are other systems out there using electric boilers and local installers would fit them.

Personally I use the oil or oil free radiators plugged into the wall, as suggested by MOnica . One in each room, and used when in that room. My bills aren't awful. They heat up quickly and produce enough heat to be comfortable.

However I do use a wood burning stove in the evenings, with the door ajar it sends heat around the place. I'm well insulated.

I ripped out storage heaters here when I moved in and haven't looked back. Awful, inefficient, expensive things to run.

Plenty of new radiators which are good looking [easily installed by electrician - or just plugged in] if you want them fixed onto the wall. [I like to move my radiators around/store them in the summer].

Fischer aren’t great.

My last home only had electricity. No gas in the area. We originally had old storage heaters which were changed to electric wall heaters that ran on a standard electricity tariff. They were much more expensive to run than the old storage heaters and we had to turn the immersion heater off as cost a fortune to run that.

These were then changed to Dimplex Quantum storage heaters and these were amazing! Back onto Economy 7. They were programmable, so there was always enough heat available and when the heating wasn’t on, there was always residual heat so the house never actually got cold and it did wonders for the mould issue we had. Cost wise it was similar to our current house where we have both gas and electric.

We changed from gas to electric in the bath & en-suite’s. Our old gas radiator came on all year round in the bathroom.
Electric is much more controllable. Rest is GCH.

Karmalady - if they are plentiful on eBay, the alarm bells should start ringing.

Can you afford to heat your home using electricity?

Is it not the absolute most expensive form of heating?

I would never voluntarily have electric heating again

I have always been a belt and braces kind of person and had both gas and electricity until I moved here. When you look for flats for older people they seem to think we are incapable of looking after ourselves despite reaching a reasonable age without their intervention. I tried everywhere to find a suitable flat with gas , but nothing doing , and so have had to have electricity. Personally if you have the chance to keep the gas I would be inclined to keep that, but do you have anywhere near by if you are old enough to have a word with someone like Age Concern, as they often know the good things that work in your area, or would be able to put you on to the right people to help. I would definitely look at good curtains with linings which can provide another layer not actually touching the windows which will help to keep the heat in too. I lived abroad quite a bit , and I do use my curtains, to keep things cool in the summer and warm in the winter. At this time of year I make sure that I am closing curtains as soon as it gets chilly. In a house I used to shut the upstairs curtains as soon as the sun went down and on very cold days in the winter I never opened the curtains at all upstairs. It all helps a bit. Hope you find something that suits you

My mum lives in a 70s semi in a village. There is no gas. Storage heaters keep her pretty snug. The modern ones are much more flexible, and you can programme them to let the heat out when you most need it. Mum’s are on all day. She has a couple of wall heaters upstairs that she can turn on if and when she needs them. She is on the economy 7 tariff, with cheap electricity overnight when the heaters are charging up.
Her electricity costs loads less than my gas+electricity, but my house is bigger and it’s hard to compare.
I think it’s worth thinking about the additional maintenance of gas central heating. We live in a hard water area. We’ve had two new boilers in 20 years. We have an extra bit of kit that filters out all of the gunk that comes off the inside of the radiators, to try to keep the system more efficient and a water softener. We just had to replace both after 10 years.
We periodically have to replace radiators that are rusty, or blocked up. Boiler servicing is an annual cost. It goes on and on. And I do worry a bit about water leaks, with all that pipework under the floors.

I came out of oil and put in an electric boiler which runs the wet central heating system, to be environmentally friendly. There is also an electric immesion heater for water. The system works well, but is expensive. The boiler currently costs roughly £2.40 per hour. That's in a 2 bed semi detached built 2011. To add insult to injury my home energy rating was downgraded! I wear lots of warm clothing in the ScottishWinter

Thank you all. Yes, I made the mistake of giving my details on the Fischer website and have been absolutely bombarded with calls, none of which I’ve taken.
I fear I have a leak in my heating system which could be very hard to find (boiler keeps losing pressure) but it would be more sensible to get out a leak detection company and get it fixed than rip it all out.
I think maybe I’m panicking. Also to insulate my house would cost a fortune as it has the original sashes, fireplaces and floorboards with wide gaps in!

LaCrepuscule I assume you have your CH system serviced each year. Ask the company that does the servicing to find out the cause of your heating problem and recommend the solution. It may be that you need a new boiler. Any new boiler will be cheaper to run than your current boiler.

Drafty floorboards only matter at ground floor level and carpet with underlay should sort that out. Sheets of acrylic, cut to size and attached to the window frame with self-adhesive magnetic strip is a good way of installing secondary double glazing at a fraction of the cost of replacing your windows. Cost £30-£50 per window plus getting someone in to do it. Chimney balloons can block chimneys and cost £15-20 each. or you could just seal the fireplace with a sheet of hardboard and mastic.

LaCrepuscul
Exactly what MOnica advises. When we bought this place 10 years ago we loved the original floorboards. But oh dear 😱 we soon changed our minds about sanding them and keeping.
The cold air was bad enough but also the noice transference from room to room.
With respect it looks as if most of what you are paying for heating is wasted.