It looks like I may obtain a grant to replace my old and inefficient Unidare storage heaters from this organization in Cornwall. From quotes I have received it will cost between £4000-£5000 and relevant to myself as an OAP with some health problems. Anyone who finds this of intertest please contact them.
Best of luck.
Be really really cautious when someone tries cheerfully suggesting spending £4k to £5k just on heating. I got a single room air source heat pump (much like air conditioning, air heat only) installed for much less than that. I recommend rooftop solar panels as your first priority if low-thousands are to be spent, because those will decrease all future bills no matter which technology you use for heating. Having got some free electricity at times, a £20 fan heater downstairs will do more than the economy-7 0.85kW heater, but might use too much electricity for your budget. Also, a 0.4kW ordinary electric heater gets more hours per week of free heating if you watch when you switch it on or buy a switch gadget called a "solar diverter" to activate a small heater while there is surplus from the solar panels. So I say look at getting renewables first, and at your age you probably don't want to do central heating pipework as that would be an awful lot of expensive work.
To an OAP with health problems, I recommend your making a plan for winter, and if planning is not what you do then ask a relative or trusted person to do that for you. A possible plan could be to consolidate spending on extra insulation and heating to downstairs only, and|or getting a lodger upstairs to double your budget for heating spending as well as being an extra person in the house for safety.
It is incorrect to describe resistive electrical storage heaters as inefficient; there is nothing wrong with their conversion of bought energy to heat and that does not change with age. An ugly sixty year old electric heater is still 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat. What has changed is that the price of bought electricity has tripled in a few recent years. Your storage heater might be "insufficient" for your requirements next winter, which is not the same as "inefficient". Now that "economy 7" is out of fashion, storage heaters are "very expensive" to run at night time and "even worse" at economy-7 day rates. Chances are that your electrics and meters had dedicated economy-7 extra bits, and it should not cost you anything to have those swapped out for a newer smart meter. It is worth your asking about "economy 10" and "octopus Agile" whatever those are, because they might find marginally less expensive times to run whatever sort of heater you have and might even be compatible with your ugly old 0.85 kiloWatt heater.
Last edited by wizzo227; 09-08-23 at 16:35.
Reason: everybody else calls it a smart meter | a solar diverter does not power things; the solar panels do that
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