On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:37:38 +0000 (UTC), Al 1953
wrote:

I'm wondering whether I should fork out for gas central heating in my new
house. However, I wonder if elctric heating will be cheaper than gas
heating after they build the new nuclear power stations. I think that's
what happened in France, isn't it?

I don't have gas, I have domestic oil heating. However, this winter I
have used a small fan heater to heat only those parts of the house I'm
actually using and I reckon it's worked out cheaper than oil.

Consider:

My house is not fitted with a CH thermostat, even though the house was
only built in 2004. Dunno why the builder didn't fit one, since he
wasn't into cutting costs. A thermostat wouldn't have cost a lot
during construction, but there ya go. It's only this winter that it
has been very cold for a long time. In previous very cold winters
heating wasn't so expensive, relatively speaking. Since 2004 the
winter heating bill was only a little higher than normal. I can
remember one winter a couple or three years back when the outside temp
barely got down to zero, it was that mild.

Anyway, back to the non-existent CH thermostat, and instead of this
each radiator is fitted with a Honeywell thermostat, so you can adjust
the temperature of each rad. That does, of course, mean that you have
to constantly monitor the setting, which is a PITA.

Next, when the CH comes on you have to wait some considerable time (20
minutes) before a cold room starts to become warm, whereas a fan
heater is instantaneous. The fan heater does have a thermoswitch, so
it constantly cycles on and off as the desired room temperature is
maintained. Most importantly, only the room I'm using is heated. Okay,
on VERY cold nights I've switched on the CH during the early hours
merely to avoid pipe damage.

I have just paid my winter electricity bill. £218 for 110 days. This
is roughly £100 more than the previous bill which was for 92 days.

BUT.....! How much targeted heating would I have got from a £100's
worth of heating oil over the same 110 day period? £100 would have
bought approx 267 litres of oil back in early December and I don't
think 267 litres would have lasted 110 days! Of course, the price of
oil has since increased (latest price I have 42.27 pence per litre
16/Mar/2010), whereas the electricity went down last year from 12.74
to 11.51 pence a unit.

I may spend up to 8 hours a day in my computer room (although retired,
I dabble in software development), so what's the point of switching
the CH on to heat (even on a low setting) the rest of the house? Sure,
it's a bit nippy taking a dump, but I grew up in houses without any
form of CH, so I can take it! And if it's REALLY cold I'll take the
fan heater with me into the bathroom. We're only talking a few minutes
here, anyway.

Most recently I purchased a small oil-filled radiatior for one room
(Argos £24.99) and it is even better than the fan heater. One should
not leave a fan heater unattended, but it's far safer to leave a room
with one of these oil-filled rads. Now, once the temperature of the
room comes up I can turn down the thermostat on this little radiator
to half or a quarter and it keeps the room quite comfortably warm for
very few pennies per hour.

I do, of course, have a considerable amount of oil left in the tank! I
use the oil boiler mainly for hot water, but that doesn't consume
anything like as much as the CH. I can get a bathful of piping hot
water and do this for days and days without the level on the oil tank
barely dropping. Just heating hot water using oil isn't expensive, I
reckon. It's the CH that whacks up the costs.

MM