Advice/comments on heating.

[Pete Keane]

We have a heating issue in a top floor apartment in a Victorian tower.

At the moment we have night storage heaters in the bedrooms,hallway and lounge, also with a warm air type heater in the lounge.

The night storage heaters dont do the job, I have been on the dimplex website and used their calculator - this tells me for the room sizes I need 3 x 2.5 kw units for each room!

We dont have gas, and I dont fancy propane or oil systems so we are pretty much stuck with electric as a power source.

I am looking at adding one extra wall mounted convector heater to each bedroom, and replacing the hall night storage heater with a convector. The lounge is ok.

I have had a look around at other electric powered heat sources - a local company offers a wall mounted heater that looks like a standard radiator but is filled with a gel - this absorbs heat quickly but gives it out slowly, topping itself up from the mains to keep a constant room temperature.

Redring offer a combination storage/convector heater, and dimplex have night storage heaters which incorporate a fan, so there are a few options.

Has anyone any experience with these or similar systems?

Any advice appreciated.

Pete.

 

[Mark]

What insulation do you have?

If heat is just leaching out of the walls and ceiling then you will need far more heat than you would if they were insulated.

Personally I hate storage heaters.

 

[MdB]

You look a bit stuck for options. I don't like night storage but it looks like your only option.

Be very careful of the blurb different companies give out on electric heaters. All are 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat. All 3kW heaters produce the same amount of heat and cost the same amount to run (if switched on at the same time). Any company that says otherwise is telling porkies. The only difference between them is the heat capacity of the bricks / gel / other inside of them and the way the heat is allowed to escape. I don't see that gel would be any better than bricks but I could be wrong. Otherwise it is generally heat up over night with cheap electricity, and radiate it over the day. This generally means lots of heat at night and early morning and little during the evening when you want it.

(just seen Marks post. Insulation is a good way forward)

 

[Pete Keane]

Yes, I need to insulate the void above one bedroom, I will use the space blanket on top of the existing stuff. I find it easier to lay under the maze of old wiring......

The other bedroom is an attic where all four walls are exterior, its close boarded - I dont know what, if any, insulation is between the boarding and the plasterboard walls, but I cant get to it anyway!

The two bedrooms have some naff aluminium dg units from the 70's - these are being replaced with wooden sash units with double glazed glass. The lounge has an original sah but to describe it as beyond repair is an understatement. A couple of the other sashs rattle, some secondary glazing is planned as they are hallway windows.

I already have the night storage units fitted, so the easiest option is to add matching convectors (Sunhouse) - not the cheapo £10 B&Q ones in white though. I dont want to keep revisiting this problem, so want to do the job right, but there are so many products which advertise themselves as 'economical' replacements - it would be good to hear from someone eho has already tried something else and whether it works or is just 'smoke and mirrors'.

As an aside, we have just stripped the roof off one section of the house - local Bridgwater tiles - and wired, felted and battened it, before replacing the same tiles with some new flashing. This void was also insulated with the space blanket. I hope to see an improvement, especially as the windows are due to come out and be replaced with like-for-like casements but with dg panels. The interesting thing was that the chicken wire used to support the felt blocked out the digital tv reception! Sometimes you cant do right for doing wrong!