Are you on the right electricity tariff?
If you have storage heaters you need to be on an economy 7 tariff. Economy 7 charges less for electricity used at night. Storage heaters “charge” at night so can make use of this cheap rate electricity. It can be a third of the price.
Economy 7 is available from all of the major suppliers. It is also available if you are on a key meter. You should contact your supplier and ask to have an Economy 7 meter fitted. There should be no charge associated with this.
You may wish to consider switching suppliers. You can do this by visiting one of the many price comparison web sites
How do storage heaters work?
Most storage heaters are wall-mounted and look a bit like radiators. They work by drawing electricity over the course of a few hours at night, and storing it as heat in a ‘bank’ of clay or ceramic bricks to use the following day. The advantage is that they can consume electricity at night, when it’s cheap (Economy 7), and give out their heat many hours later.
Every storage heater has a set of simple controls. An input setting allows you to regulate the amount of heat that the heater stores during the night. This is important
because, even though night-rate electricity is cheap, there’s no point paying for more than you need. If it’s not particularly cold, or you’ll be out of the house for most of the day, you don’t need to set the input to maximum because there’s no point storing so much heat. Most storage heaters will only charge up at night, so there is no danger of using expensive day-rate electricity.
The controls also have an output setting that allows you to regulate the amount of heat that the storage heater gives off. It means you don’t have to use up all the stored heat at once, but can let it out gradually, saving some for the evening if you want to.
Some storage heaters have a timer that gives you even more control over the output. It allows you, for example, to programme your heater to come on at a time that suits
you, for example when you get up in the morning or just before you get back from work. Others include a control that regulates the amount of charge the heater draws at night, depending on the temperature.
Some storage heaters have a ‘boost’ setting. This doesn’t use ‘cheap-rate’ stored heat, but uses ‘peak-rate’ electricity directly from the mains, so it should only be
used if the stored heat has run out.
Tips for lower bills
• The output setting of your storage heater should be turned off at night and also turned off when you are out of the room or out of the house
• Don’t use the boost setting except when you really need the extra heat
• Avoid using supplementary plug-in heaters. It’s better to turn up the input on your storage heater and store more heat