Electric Radiators - Should I Avoid This Rental?

[robtherevelator1969]

Firstly, well done on finding a new vacant rental property. As IW says, check the EPC for comments. It is your right to see the full document.
If possible, ask to see the electric usage for the last twelve months. I note that the electric heater on photo 2 is a 'High Heat Retention' night storage heater, that helps the EPC score. Check the property has an E7 or E10 dual rate meter as the NSH charges up on the night (low) rate, so much the better if the meter is a radio time switch. You can set a room temperature in the NSH and it will do such. It effectively distributed heat by a fan sucking air through the hot core. On really cold days it may use day electric the heat the room. The fan uses peak rate electric to run, hence the two cables going to the heater.
The panel heater in photo 4 used peak rate electricity so will be more costly to run.

The log burner wouldn't worry me, do get a Sterling Engine Fan to sit on it - that will blow warm air away from the log burner when it heats up. A benefit of the log burner is it will cause an air flow reducing (maybe eliminating) damp in the property.

I'd not hang around worrying about the house but having found one at an affordable price in an area that suits you go for it. If the worst comes to the worst you have six months to find somewhere else but with so many LandLords getting out of the business it will only get harder.

Hi many thanks for your reply. Someone has told me i can download the full epc so i got it off the gov site, please see the above post. Thanks for spotting the heater models and their functionality, i will look to see if the have an off peak meter to benefit from this. I will also ask about the energy usage over the last year, from what the house listing says, the new heaters were fitted May 2023 just before the EPC was last done.

Thanks for the tips on the log burner too, worth using if it reduces my bills.

Yeah i was thinking the same, go for the house and hope for the best, the lack of gas heating might put other people off.

I thought the EPC had to be a C maximum on rentals?
Perhaps I'm wrong.

I would deffo use the log burner, as I have a pile of free wood in the garden. And loads more to trim. I now go round local skips and take timber off cuts or old studwork that's been ripped out. That's well seasoned and I won't have to wait for that to dry out.

The old oak joists are the best.

Hi mate thanks for your reply. I think the C rating rules are coming in the future.

Thanks for the tips on the log burner, im more likely to buy bags of wood as im a lazy sod lol

Thick lined curtains will help a lot.

If you have cheap rate night electricity, you can use an electric heater in the bedroom overnight, though an electric blanket will be even cheaper to run.

Oil filled radiators give an even and comfortable heat, and are safer than ordinary convectors. Timers will help you put them on shortly before you need heat.

Storage Heaters are most suitable if you are at home all day and go to bed early.

Hi mate thanks for your reply. I will invest in thick lined curtains too. I need to check if it has an off peak meter of not. I have an electric blanket that i dont use so i can use it in the winter. Thanks for all the advice

I'm not sure that log burner would comply with building control, it seems too big for the opening and wouldn't be able to be ventilated properly. You could ask if its been signed off.

If you can source cheap wood, they are great at keeping a house warm. Does it have a gas boiler or is it all electric?

Thanks for the reply and advice mate. I will ask about the log burner, i did not know they had to be signed off so its worth asking.

I have posted the details from the epc report above, it only has electric immersion for hot water, no tank, electric shower.

 

[robtherevelator1969]

If they're storage heaters then it may make sense to use them as they are, definitely if there's cavity wall insulation behind them. But you need to make a judgement, as you'll pay more for daytime power so if you only have one then it may not be worth using it.

Heating with on-demand electricity is expensive, but not world-ending levels of cost. Keep the smart meter display on view and don't worry about the odd expensive day in winter. We were sometimes spending apporaching £20/day in winter, the highest bill was £500 for the month, but today it's around £1, so it all evens out through the year.

Don't even consider buying wood for the log burner, it's very likely to cost more than the equivalent electricity. They're more of a trendy annoyance than an actual heating source unless you can get free wood. It will damage your health and harm your neighbours, we'll probably look back at this illogical trend in 20 years time and be shocked at how trends can overcome logic.

Thanks again for the advice and reply. It is only the 1 heater that is a storage heater so maybe its not worth going for the off peak tariff. I posted the details from the epc 2 posts up and there seems to be cavity walls insulation and 200mm of loft insulation.

I notice my energy costs go high when i use the washing machine or have a shower, its only myself so hopefully it wont be too obscene.

Im too lazy to source free wood so it would mean buying wood. Its probably not worth the expense at the moment.

Should keep the log burner going for a day or two !

lol great idea mate

We rent a 200 yr old stone built cottage to a nice but slightly whacky couple, when we bought it it had old storage heaters, an open fire in an horrendous out of character brick fireplace. I ripped the lot out and fitted electric pannel heaters with a timer and thermostat, also a multi fuel stove much like in the picture, the loft insulation is 300mm and the cottage has D/G and is mid terrace, the tenants love it they have a small pottery business and get lots of pallets they cut up and burn, they also have a couple of portable oil filled heaters as back up if needed. Check the level of insulation and if your on certain benefits you may be elligible for cavity wall insulation, with the landlords permission of course, I would say go for it!

Hi mate thanks for the advice and reply. Sounds like you have done a great job going all electric with the heating system and the tenants are happy. The house im interested in has 200mm of loft insulation and also cavity insulation. I posted the epc report 2 posts up. Im not on any benefits though. thanks

 

[JohnD]

If you are in good health you can tolerate a cold house using suitable clothing and bedding. With an electric blanket you can sleep comfortably even if the room is frosty. But condensation and damp are very harmful and will cause mould and ill health. Some people try to save money by blocking ventilation which leads to damp. Never drape wet washing inside the house, and use an extractor fan in the bathroom.

I am prone to chest problems and use a small electric radiator in cold weather to ensure the bedroom is warm and dry even when the CH goes off at night. If you can afford to heat the whole house, even by only a few degrees, this will keep it dry and more comfortable.

 

[foxhole]

The wood burner should provide majority of heating , had one installed and my heating bill is now zero , lots of free timber available .
Just ensure it has hetas sign off( but should not be let without one).

 

[jeds]

It really all comes down to actual cost of heating over the last couple of years, which they should have records for if you ask? I think that will depend if the meter is on an economy tarif? You wouldn't want to be running electric heaters on a standard these days.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

Never drape wet washing inside the house, and use an extractor fan in the bathroom.

..and a cooker hood. Always simmer/boil with lids on the pans, too.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

Hopefully the house is still available after all this pondering.

It's possible someone else will have grabbed it by now.

 

[ericmark]

I was asked to write a web page saying how bad log burning is, however decided first to find out if really that bad.

The major issue was particular emissions, there are a number of ways to avoid this, but the main one is to ensure the fire is hot enough, often with air directed above the fuel, to get the fire to burn hot.

However this means until wood is reduced to charcoal, it needs to burn at a set rate, however we want to heat the home to a variable degree, so we need a method to store the heat, then release as required.

Also all wood in fact also coal, has around the same heat release per unit weight when dry, coal is drier than wood so does have more output, but the fire is limited by volume not weight, so the grate needs to be adjustable to burn diffrent density fuel.

This means a very expensive system is required, if your going to burn wood in an efficient way, so in the main the wood burning fire is there as an emergency option should the electrial supply fail, it is not designed for daily use.

However the chimney or flue can cause drafts, I have a wood panel covering mine, with a hole to plug the AC into.

Clearly you can light a fire, but not really a good method of heating the home, and it needs some trunking of some sort to bring the combustion air to the fire, other wise it will cause drafts, and you will need high backed chairs like in the old days when we all had open fires.

So the electric heaters will be main way of heating. Here you are looking at the control method, if I heated every room in my house 15 including hall and landing it would cost a fortune, so with my oil fired heating I have electronic thermostatic radiator valves in most room which I can set what time and heat each room is heated.

The same with electric, a light heater which only turns on when required can be cheap to run, but although we may want a central boiler or heat store, we want control as to when it turns on, and the lower the hysteresis the better.

But this is linked to life style, I lived in a caravan with electric heating for a time, small area to heat, and only heated 6 PM to 10 PM so quite cheap. If I had been working from home it would have cost a fortune.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

Setting fire to bits of wood in your living room is a really stupid way of heating a house, both for efficiency and pollution reasons. If you're going to use wood to heat a house then the only efficient way is a wood-fired boiler, with its own independent balanced flue, heating water for radiators. While you're at it, it needs to feed itself with fuel as required to produce the required heat. These things have existed for lots of years, they use wood pellets, exactly the same stuff that's also sold as cat litter. If you have a cat then it may be cheaper to but wood fuel pellets instead, you'll get a lot more of the same stuff for less.

As pointed out above, the biggest issue is that every litre of filthy polluted toxic gas that goes out of the flue needs to be replaced by a litre of clean air, which needs to be pulled into the building from outside. It's effectively an extractor fan. This incoming air will be the same temperature as the outside air, and if your neighbours are all as trendy as you then this will also be polluted.

But lots of people get really passionate and irrational about the subject, and it's been something of a trend for the last few years. It has a romantic element, people think it's lovely and old-fashioned. From the good old days, when people commonly died at a young age from various lung conditions. Then we got the clean air act, things massively improved, lifespans increased but this was long enough ago that people have now forgotten the lessons that we learned.

 

[denso13]

The wood burner should provide majority of heating , had one installed and my heating bill is now zero , lots of free timber available .

It is actually surprisingly warm, more than I expected. I installed one for my son and it gives off a fair bit of heat.

You might not even need dedicated ventilation.

 

[foxhole]

Setting fire to bits of wood in your living room is a really stupid way of heating a house, both for efficiency and pollution reasons. If you're going to use wood to heat a house then the only efficient way is a wood-fired boiler, with its own independent balanced flue, heating water for radiators. While you're at it, it needs to feed itself with fuel as required to produce the required heat. These things have existed for lots of years, they use wood pellets, exactly the same stuff that's also sold as cat litter. If you have a cat then it may be cheaper to but wood fuel pellets instead, you'll get a lot more of the same stuff for less.

As pointed out above, the biggest issue is that every litre of filthy polluted toxic gas that goes out of the flue needs to be replaced by a litre of clean air, which needs to be pulled into the building from outside. It's effectively an extractor fan. This incoming air will be the same temperature as the outside air, and if your neighbours are all as trendy as you then this will also be polluted.

But lots of people get really passionate and irrational about the subject, and it's been something of a trend for the last few years. It has a romantic element, people think it's lovely and old-fashioned. From the good old days, when people commonly died at a young age from various lung conditions. Then we got the clean air act, things massively improved, lifespans increased but this was long enough ago that people have now forgotten the lessons that we learned.

Many modern wood burner have integral vents directly into the stove so provide all the air directly.

 

[ericmark]

Then we got the clean air act, things massively improved, lifespans increased but this was long enough ago that people have now forgotten the lessons that we learned.

With an owner occupier I would have pointed out the methods used, the idea is normally to combine multi sources using a water heat exchanger, and have burners which draw air from outside burning it in an efficient manor, there are some DIY methods the latter two are condensing, but can't see how a tenant can install these, so seemed pointless to show them. The major fault as far as I see it is it needs some back up power, except for the DIY model known as the rocket mass heater, the super efficient wood burners need motors, so with a power failure you need either some method to put out the fire, or remove the fire, I remember as a lad when the water supply went off needing to drop the grate and carry the fire outside on a shovel. We had quarry tiled floors so they were not damaged with red hot coals being dropped on them.

The auto feed pellet burner can turn off faster, but it means getting wood becomes expensive, the guy who asked me to do that web page, said most people with wood burners were thieves, think that is a little unfair, but he was finding people collecting wood carefully left to rot in his 20 acre wood land, messing up his attempt at natural forest practice, so I can see why he was unset at people taking the wood away.

The idea is to generate a cycle,

but the cycle as you can see is not complete, so burning wood is not good for the environment, however he still had BBQ's on his land, which must be even more wasteful. And he had at least three wood burners,

and his wood store was massive. It was a case of do as I say, not as I do. But all in all a nice guy, and I was lucky to have met him, last time I saw him before he died, I took him on our local steam train.

However the question is cost not how good to the environment, and wood burning is expensive, and also fills the home with dust, so in real terms it is a back up, for when the main heating fails.

One plus for electric heaters is they can easy be switched on/off, using heat recovery units

and other methods to conserve the heat is a good idea, but one can select to use a small room in the winter and allow the home to cool down, there is no need to keep all rooms at 20ºC 24/7, one of the problems with central heating, is it is not easy to select what rooms are heated when, I have two zones, and the main house is sub divided into a further 8 areas each with it's own programmable TRV head, but they are not cheap, and a tenant would not want to fit his own programmable heads, so electric could work out cheaper due to the room by room control.

As said also down to life style, I have automated my home to some extent, and we do have some rooms rarely used in the winter, and flicking a switch off is far easier than setting up linked TRV heads.

Yes when house hunting I rejected houses with under floor heating and no paperwork to say how installed as so easy to end up heating the ground below the house, but far harder to sell a problem house and buy another than to find another home to rent.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

When we moved into our house with a wood burner (expensive and modern), my other half went round the living room with a cloth and bucket of water. You couldn't see it until wiped, but there were black smears all over all the walls when she started wiping them. The walls were a shade lighter after.

This is what is being constantly fed into your lungs if you have one, also your neighbours' too. They seem like one of those things we'll look back on and wonder why anyone thought they were a good idea, possibly after a spike in lung-related illnesses.

We're good enough with electric heaters for now. I couldn't work out why they didn't achieve much the first year, until I stuffed a pillow up the flue of the disused log burner, this made a vast difference.

The mid/long-term plan is full air conditioning throughout, which will provide winter heat or summer cooling. Basically a heat pump but via ceiling vents rather than radiators. Use energy wisely to move the heat from outside to inside rather than just turning it into heat.

 

[Diver Fred]

The mid/long-term plan is full air conditioning throughout, which will provide winter heat or summer cooling. Basically a heat pump but via ceiling vents rather than radiators. Use energy wisely to move the heat from outside to inside rather than just turning it into heat.

I hope it's successful for you. I have lived in two houses with 'central air' (combined heating/cooling) systems. Both of them cold, drafty, expensive to run and dusty. 1st house was in UK, ex-USA military built in the late 1950's, well insulated (cavities and loft). Even put the air in recirculation it never really did feel comfortable downstairs, in the end we swapped the house around (bedrooms downstairs, living room upstairs). 2nd house in Colorado built 1980, very well insulated. In neither house did the building fabric feel warm.
Mates family moved into house in an Estate, all the houses had massive night storage heater block with distributed air to ground level vents built late 1960's. Again in very cold winter's totally ineffective. Most people in the estate replaced the heating system with a boiler and radiators.

 

[Brigadier]

I had an air source heat pump in my old house.

Below a certain outside temperature (minus 2 c?) they won't work on heating cycle.
Which is obviously when you really need them to.