On 20/11/2017 14:40, David wrote:
On Mon, 20 Nov 2017 10:38:53 +0000, tim... wrote:

snip

can you not get bottled gas or oil?

tim

Back in the day IIRC the cost for energy used to be (cheapest first):

Mains gas.

Mains electric.

Has that ever been true even in the dim and distant days of white heat
of technology "electricity too cheap to meter" ? My recollection of
electric storage heaters (my parents were early adopters) were insanely
ugly boxes that got mad hot in the middle of the night and lost their
heat during the day when no-one was home and provided precious little
useful heat in the evening thus ensuring the expensive electric fire and
fan heater got run as well. They were basically a waste of space. The
firebricks came in handy for making a small kiln after we scrapped them.

Blocks of flats designed for all electric heating with a brick core in
the centre of each flat and under floor heating seemed to work but were
still pretty expensive to keep warm in winter.

Mains electric can only really win if you combine it with ground source
heat pump technology (and even then when all the mechanical maintenance
is included it is pretty borderline).

Bulk gas or oil or solid fuel.

Bottled gas.

Wood is a bit of a funny one because it used to be dirt cheap but with all
the trendy wood burners it is now very expensive in most areas.

If the list above is reasonably accurate then electric heating (of almost
any sort) would be cheaper than bottled gas.

It might perhaps be cheaper than bottled gas (particularly if you only
keep one room in the house warm) but I doubt if it will beat oil now for
an equivalent amount of energy delivered. If you compare like for like
then I think the order is :

Mains gas
(big gap)
Oil
Bottled Gas
Coal
(big gap)
Electricity

The position of wood burner depends on whether you are burning scrap
wood or kiln dried splinter free designer logs. Either way it is bit of
a faff smashing stuff up to burn almost every day.

Our village hall is entirely electric and costs the earth to keep warm
in winter. If there was any way to heat it some other way we would do.

So one way would be to switch to a supplier with an Economy 7 tariff and
run the storage heaters as normal, then top up during the day using fan
heaters, oil filled radiators, whatever. Electric heaters for the rooms
without storage heaters - storage radiators would be good if easy to fit.

Immersion heater for the hot water.

Run the wood burner for pleasure when there is cheap wood available, and
get bonus hot water and radiators. Don't rely on it for the primary source
of heating.

Or get an oil boiler installed to power the existing radiators.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown