God this takes me back to one of my formative moments of frustration. My school had these heaters because a good part of it was made up of a series of non-connected portakabins. None of the staff knew how to use them. Both dials were always left at maximum because of course the were, so the boost dampers were always open. In the afternoon, it would get too hot, so they'd shut the islolator switch off. Then naturally, the following morning it would be bloody freezing, so the switch would get turned back on and the 2kW fan heater cracked out. Then of course, the following day it was boiling so off with the isolator again... It was enough to send a young technically-minded person round the chuffing bend.
m not a lover of storage heaters but used to instal hundreds of this type in local villages as they had no main gas supply. I will say they were very reliable and easy to use. unlike to present heaters where no one can work out how to set them up properly. I have given up on the number of times I have had to go back and explain how they work and one old lady gave up and just bought a convector heater from Argos. Then when these new type go wrong ,well you can guess how much the parts are . Keep these old heaters going as long as you can
Some I worked on many years ago had a melting safety link in of a fusible thermal device . They used to go open circuit if people put there cloths on the heater .. The worst thing about storage heaters is carrying the bricks up three flight of stairs 😮
I priced replacing four heaters once over the phone. Got there to realise it was 4th floor flat with no lift. Then had to take the old ones away as well...
Thanks for this and the related productions. About 40 years ago, I had a pair of storage heaters installed in my house - Creda, in this case. They are still in use, but the choice between them and a balanced flue gas fire varies depending on the pricing regime. The price ratio between night rate, day rate, and gas has changed a lot over the years. Out to Dec 2025 the rates are: 25.24, 17.16, 6.05 p/kWh (day, night, gas). Standing charges added together are 86.09 p/day. Notwithstanding the advertising by the company involved, at present locally used gas is a lot cheaper than even ninth rate electricity overall, even allowing for the energy lost out to the open air via the flue. Do the sums yourself. The structural walls of this house are heavy concrete blocks - almost a kind of built in thermal storage blocks, in effect. Thus using heaters to maintain a minimum temperature works quite well. Quite different c.f. houses built with timber frames (and often fitted with built in warm air heating) which were popular in the early 1980s. The remote control of them has changed over the decades. Originally, there wasn’t any, There was a clockwork control unit in tandem with a twin rate rotary disc meter, which was replaced later on by radio teleswitch one, again with a rotary disc meter, then a more modern electronic one with built in fixed timings, and now a smart meter with (at present) preset times. In principle the form could now use remote switching for the restricted supply output. At present it’s an Aclara SGM1400-B product.
Strange how this concept of Electricity to heat your home become old school but now has become the new thing! Excellent and knowledgeable dismantling by John as usual without the intervention of superstar Big Clive with his 'Hammer of knowledge' to get to the finer details
Hi John. The bimetallic strip works in reverse to the way you think. As the heat rises, the strip closes the flap. This design has a flaw in that when the heat starts to become depleted, the flap will open (if the boost is set to 4 or more) thus depleting the heat even quicker! The reason for it working in this way is that the flat will cycle (on auto models) with a higher number set means the flap will open more frequently and for longer. Hope that's useful
Excellent presentation as always, when I moved into my present home 30 years ago, every room had a storage heater and also a dual rate electricity meter than ran from 23:00 to 06:00 for the cheaper rate electricity, although the day rate was higher than a normal single rate meter.
I remember the house i grew up in had these throughout the 80's and into the early 90's. They were the "in-thing" in the UK with Ecomomy7 cheap night electricity. They always gave off a funny burning smell, thats what i remember most about them. But they worked well and gave off heat right into the evening.
It's possible we weren't using them correctly I suppose. But after the oil fired central heating system in our house was decommissioned in the late seventies, we had a bunch of these when I was growing up. By the time the cooler evening came round they were bloody useless is my recollection. Mum's on gas central heating now and it's much better. Given the conversion and transmission losses from a gas powered power station sending electricity compared to heating up water using a gas boiler, it's a more efficient and less climate unfriendly option. Obviously if all electricity were from renewable that calculation would be different
Thanks for putting the video together. I've never met a occupant who liked these heaters. I think the usual problem is they often leak heat, so when you actually need the heat most of it has already gone. It's also difficult to control the amount of heat that comes out of them, which is a closely related issue. And on another related note, the radio teleswitch meters that often control these heaters are all being replaced now, due to the possibility of the BBC radio signal being switched off sometime soon. This won't be the end of it though, because the bandwidth the new smart meters use will at some point become redundant also no doubt, just as it is in the coming years for the first generation smets1 smart meters which use 2G/3G.
Yes just had to my radio teleswitch meter replaced. Luckily my supplier put me on Economy 7 with my new smart meter, but I lost my separate heating rate (which was just for storage heaters circuits) which will definitely hit the pocket if I have to boost a heater during the day...
Thanks again for a great video just so happens I have two to repair one doesn’t come on the other seems to massively over heat according to customer thanks again this video is really helpful
New thermostats for both. Some have an overheat cutout which a small button to reset, but from experience once they have overheated they won't work properly again, so may as well replace the thermostat.
I do not miss servicing these. Or their older forebears with the open spiral elements. I do still have some bricks "that might be useful one day" stacked outside my garage...
We've had one for decades, still working. Every 10 years or so the thermostat goes. The first time it went, I watched the electrician replace it so have done it myself since.
@@melgrant7404 No, it just wouldn't turn on at all. Looking online, I found a video on how to reset the thermostat if it's cut out due to overheating. There's a little metal tab on the thermostat that needs to be pressed. You'll hear a tiny click when doing so. This restored the heat and I thought it was fixed but a few days later it cut out again indicating the thermostat was failing. Only a new thermostat fixed it permanently. I guess the thermostat is one of the few moving parts in the heater as it clicks on and off each day and only has a limited number of clicks before it wears out!
@@blutey I find parts are harder to find for the older heaters.im having to replace one of my old heaters because the thermostat is hard to find nowadays.
I found some “storage” heaters used a cross-flow fan at the bottom to blow the heat out = they found these to be more efficient if they over-insulated the top of the unit ~ without the thermostatic flap thing that heat leaked out of, as heat rises, and having the bottom open. The heating element/s and bricks would be mounted on a bracket-bar and a air-gap at the front, top & back of the insulation and bricks. The air would often be drawn through a dust filter to stop dust from depositing on the bricks and “burning” on them, then flowing up the back>over the top>down the front to the fan. The “booster” element was above the fan and only was turned on in the evening when the bricks were almost depleted of heat. There would be 2 thermostats; 1 to heat the bricks at the desired temperature, and the other to turn the fan on with the room temperature and a booster switch to turn on the “booster” element with the fans thermostat.
I disconnected multiple storage heaters on behalf of an asbestos removal company for the council. They all appeared to be the same model of heater. It turned out that some did contain asbestos and some didn’t. Don’t know if they were from different batches or some were newer than they appeared. They were freestanding with the wood effect front that was painted onto the metal.
Yeah as someone mentioned before you forgot to mention the fusable link can go 167° and you can buy separately and do not need to replace the whole thermostat assembly. Dimpled have a thermal reset
I remember some people removing the 20amp switch and putting sockets on instead so they could run their appliances from the off peak board back when the storage heaters had a mechanical time switch and only the heaters would use low rate and the rest of the installation was charged at normal rate .The only drawback is that they could only be used at night,which confused some people.
Best thing these days is use it to charge a battery off the cheap rate electric. Then use that during the day or even sell it back to the grid if you have the appropriate meter.
In the good old days cheap rate electricity was for storage heaters ONLY and if you dared to use the circuit for other purposes the supplier company would enter your property!!
If your house has a separate heating rate (as well as day+night), then sadly the electricity companies have cottoned on this. Storage heaters are consistent, so if you start wiring plug sockets in instead, the electricity company will notice the amount of electricity you use on the heating circuit suddenly changing!
@@Ed.R Now on Agile tariff and Octopus have disabled the timer in the smart meter so I can activate the storage heaters whenever there is cheap electricity available.
Remember fitting these by the hundreds in the mid to late 80’s as an apprentice! We used to have competitions on carrying packs of blocks up to the local authority flats. Managed 7 packs in one go, and quickly realised on the 3rd level How the hell I was going to open the door or put them down without smashing lol
I'm in Heating zone 7 and use some 1960's steffes/Stiben heaters connected to Off-peak electric.The only problem is that the elements are failing. I am planing on changing to a large storage tank system with hydronic heating and thermal solar.
Some I had to take apart for a flat refurbishment were old old and huge. Hate to guess when they might have been manufactured and installed. The bricks were very obviously the same sort of high alumina content material that refractory fire brick for furnaces are made from. They had semi-circular channels moulded in them down which naked NIC80 or similar coils ran, suspended from bars that doubled as both support and current supplying bus bar. Three sets hanging down between 4 layers of bricks front to back. Horribly inefficient, so much so that despite the Economy7 supply and tariff they were dreadfully expensive to run (this was late 80s/early 90s). It took two of us all day to disassemble, dismount and remove four from the first and second floors but we were glad to put the work in to see the back of the damned things!
Like the need for heat resistant cable, ceramic choc blocks for the elements, but plastic for the supply - nicely browning in the heat! Solar heat stores (immersion heaters) have come back, but doubt a rooftop solar inverter could supply enough current for an effective heat system (even a simple resistive load).
From what I've heard they were often more expensive to run heating in workplaces than using plug-in heaters during peak time electricity. This is mainly due to older buildings having poor insulation and these heaters heating 24Hr/day instead of the 9 to 10 hours the building is occupied. Having worked in a few buildings that had storage heaters, they were difficult to regulate, especially if one night it was frosty and then 10C overnight the next, after increasing the input dial.
I have a larger one in my conservatory. I stopped using it when electricity prices shot up, and used a cheap diesel heater instead. But I'm back to using it again, as I'm only paying 7p kwh at night now. The only problem is, I tend to spend my time in there, in the evenings, so the heat is mostly waisted during the day.
Storage heaters may find a niche again now that fossil fuels are being phased out and insulation standards are improving. If you have a small dwelling that is very well insulated and has little outside space (like most flats) these could be perfect. You would not have space for a wet heat pump system. A well insulated dwelling with a reasonable thermal mass requires a steady trickle of heat to keep up a stable comfortable temperature. If you size the storage heater generously (which wouldn’t mean big, given good insulation) then a reasonably stable temperature can be achieved 24 hrs with off peak electricity, such as through the Octopus Go tariff. There are plenty of 16 amp timers available to wire them up. Gone are the days of radio controlled twin supply meters. Chose your tariff, and set your timer accordingly (for now....). Dwellings in the 1960’s/70’s were barely insulated at all. They required high output heaters when people were in the building, and were probably best left unheated when unoccupied. This really did not suit storage heaters. But well insulated dwellings to modern standards do. With more offshore wind on the way we might have more disparity between supply and demand, and a greater differential between peak and off peak prices. It is hard to predict how much this will be offset by car charging and other new uses. If more tariffs like Agile Octopus become available (with very flexible pricing according to supply and demand on the grid) then storage heaters could become even more useful. We would need switches that could be controlled live. But the storage heater will always be sitting there ready for the supply (at least in the cold months) whereas the electric car may not be sitting on the drive.
These old storage heaters are being phased out because apparently they can't be installed under new regs. All new heaters must have sufficient points with regards to energy efficiency. Problem with it is that now a storage heater costs close to a grand and even a basic panel heater is £200 - 300.
Which is pretty funny considering electric heat is already basically 100% efficient. But sure, heat pumps are more efficient. And if someone really wants a heat storage unit, pour floors with radiant heat and dump heat into it with a heat pump.
@Lagittaja It's got more to do with things like open window detection, better heat retention for storage heaters, fan heat distribution and programmable timers. Things that apparently reduce energy consumption by the heater not really the actual efficiency of the heater itself.
Reminds me of when the electrician fitted one in every room of a house and left them running. Place still smelt of burnt paint weeks later. Put a decent load on the electric supply to as the meter tails were noticeably warm.
I'm thinking of getting one to divert my solar surplus and 7p night rate into using my Eddi 2nd output , using an oil filled at the moment but this would hold heat for longer
@@bigjd2k Yeah I have a vague memory of the wall connection plates for these units, which had a "Main" supply fed from the Economy 7 switch and a "Boost" supply fed from the standard socket circuit so that the booster could still be used in on-peak times.
Yikes …..I haven’t seen a storage heater in donkeys years, I used to install these back when i was an apprentice Electrician in and around 1979 they were quite popular form of heating
Our house has 3 Dimplex storage heaters which we use as our main heating (we also have a Corona paraffin heater which we use in autumn/spring) - our Dimplexes have a sort of tube/probe thing which dangles from the bottom right, and attached by a seemingly slightly flexible metal wire and it seems to be related to the thermostat - what precisely is this probe-thing and how does it work (and what are the failure situations of it)
That is what was sold as an 'automatic' storage heater - the probe is the end of a thermostat, which senses room temperature and adjusts the heat input control accordingly. They work up to a point, but as with everything storage heater related they are not particularly accurate so actual results will vary. The thin wire is actually a tube, the end probe and the tube are filled with liquid which expands/contracts as the temperature changes, and the pressure of that liquid is what adjusts the thermostat control. Similar principle to thermostats used in ovens and fridges. The probe should be located near the floor at the back of the heater so it is only affected by the air temperature and not by heat from the heater. If they fail, it's either thermostat on permanently or off permanently, so the heater will be far too hot, or won't heat up at all.
@@jwflame Thanks, that’s informative - it sounds incredibly Heath-Robinson to the point I’m amazed it got out of the door as a technical solution! I’m going to take a closer look at ours (probably next spring when we’re not using them daily)
One of the worst things ever invented. Took them straight out when my Mum moved into a Bungalow. Never hot in evening. Boiling in the middle of the night. Then on when the weather goes mild and wasting money. Complete rubbish.
God this takes me back to one of my formative moments of frustration. My school had these heaters because a good part of it was made up of a series of non-connected portakabins. None of the staff knew how to use them. Both dials were always left at maximum because of course the were, so the boost dampers were always open. In the afternoon, it would get too hot, so they'd shut the islolator switch off. Then naturally, the following morning it would be bloody freezing, so the switch would get turned back on and the 2kW fan heater cracked out. Then of course, the following day it was boiling so off with the isolator again... It was enough to send a young technically-minded person round the chuffing bend.
m not a lover of storage heaters but used to instal hundreds of this type in local villages as they had no main gas supply. I will say they were very reliable and easy to use.
unlike to present heaters where no one can work out how to set them up properly. I have given up on the number of times I have had to go back and explain how they work and one old lady gave up and just bought a convector heater from Argos. Then when these new type go wrong ,well you can guess how much the parts are . Keep these old heaters going as long as you can
Some I worked on many years ago had a melting safety link in of a fusible thermal device .
They used to go open circuit if people put there cloths on the heater ..
The worst thing about storage heaters is carrying the bricks up three flight of stairs 😮
I priced replacing four heaters once over the phone. Got there to realise it was 4th floor flat with no lift. Then had to take the old ones away as well...
Oof @@tebscat
Thanks for this and the related productions. About 40 years ago, I had a pair of storage heaters installed in my house - Creda, in this case. They are still in use, but the choice between them and a balanced flue gas fire varies depending on the pricing regime. The price ratio between night rate, day rate, and gas has changed a lot over the years. Out to Dec 2025 the rates are: 25.24, 17.16, 6.05 p/kWh (day, night, gas). Standing charges added together are 86.09 p/day.
Notwithstanding the advertising by the company involved, at present locally used gas is a lot cheaper than even ninth rate electricity overall, even allowing for the energy lost out to the open air via the flue. Do the sums yourself.
The structural walls of this house are heavy concrete blocks - almost a kind of built in thermal storage blocks, in effect. Thus using heaters to maintain a minimum temperature works quite well. Quite different c.f. houses built with timber frames (and often fitted with built in warm air heating) which were popular in the early 1980s.
The remote control of them has changed over the decades. Originally, there wasn’t any, There was a clockwork control unit in tandem with a twin rate rotary disc meter, which was replaced later on by radio teleswitch one, again with a rotary disc meter, then a more modern electronic one with built in fixed timings, and now a smart meter with (at present) preset times. In principle the form could now use remote switching for the restricted supply output. At present it’s an Aclara SGM1400-B product.
Great stuff John. Thanks for the explanatory video.
Strange how this concept of Electricity to heat your home become old school but now has become the new thing! Excellent and knowledgeable dismantling by John as usual without the intervention of superstar Big Clive with his 'Hammer of knowledge' to get to the finer details
Big Clive's hammer is called 'X-Ray', his vice is the 'Vice of Knowledge' 😊
@Stuart-AJC nice one you know your stuff
Hi John. The bimetallic strip works in reverse to the way you think. As the heat rises, the strip closes the flap. This design has a flaw in that when the heat starts to become depleted, the flap will open (if the boost is set to 4 or more) thus depleting the heat even quicker! The reason for it working in this way is that the flat will cycle (on auto models) with a higher number set means the flap will open more frequently and for longer. Hope that's useful
the bi metal flap bends and opens the flap as it cools down to give you more heat as the core cools!
Excellent presentation as always, when I moved into my present home 30 years ago, every room had a storage heater and also a dual rate electricity meter than ran from 23:00 to 06:00 for the cheaper rate electricity, although the day rate was higher than a normal single rate meter.
I remember the house i grew up in had these throughout the 80's and into the early 90's. They were the "in-thing" in the UK with Ecomomy7 cheap night electricity. They always gave off a funny burning smell, thats what i remember most about them. But they worked well and gave off heat right into the evening.
It's possible we weren't using them correctly I suppose. But after the oil fired central heating system in our house was decommissioned in the late seventies, we had a bunch of these when I was growing up. By the time the cooler evening came round they were bloody useless is my recollection. Mum's on gas central heating now and it's much better. Given the conversion and transmission losses from a gas powered power station sending electricity compared to heating up water using a gas boiler, it's a more efficient and less climate unfriendly option. Obviously if all electricity were from renewable that calculation would be different
Thanks for putting the video together. I've never met a occupant who liked these heaters. I think the usual problem is they often leak heat, so when you actually need the heat most of it has already gone. It's also difficult to control the amount of heat that comes out of them, which is a closely related issue. And on another related note, the radio teleswitch meters that often control these heaters are all being replaced now, due to the possibility of the BBC radio signal being switched off sometime soon. This won't be the end of it though, because the bandwidth the new smart meters use will at some point become redundant also no doubt, just as it is in the coming years for the first generation smets1 smart meters which use 2G/3G.
Yes just had to my radio teleswitch meter replaced. Luckily my supplier put me on Economy 7 with my new smart meter, but I lost my separate heating rate (which was just for storage heaters circuits) which will definitely hit the pocket if I have to boost a heater during the day...
Thanks again for a great video just so happens I have two to repair one doesn’t come on the other seems to massively over heat according to customer thanks again this video is really helpful
New thermostats for both. Some have an overheat cutout which a small button to reset, but from experience once they have overheated they won't work properly again, so may as well replace the thermostat.
@ Thank you will do
I do not miss servicing these. Or their older forebears with the open spiral elements.
I do still have some bricks "that might be useful one day" stacked outside my garage...
I don’t miss lugging bricks up and down flights of stairs for these things.
We've had one for decades, still working. Every 10 years or so the thermostat goes. The first time it went, I watched the electrician replace it so have done it myself since.
Did your heater get too hot because the thermostat failed.
@@melgrant7404 No, it just wouldn't turn on at all. Looking online, I found a video on how to reset the thermostat if it's cut out due to overheating. There's a little metal tab on the thermostat that needs to be pressed. You'll hear a tiny click when doing so. This restored the heat and I thought it was fixed but a few days later it cut out again indicating the thermostat was failing. Only a new thermostat fixed it permanently.
I guess the thermostat is one of the few moving parts in the heater as it clicks on and off each day and only has a limited number of clicks before it wears out!
@@blutey I find parts are harder to find for the older heaters.im having to replace one of my old heaters because the thermostat is hard to find nowadays.
@@melgrant7404 Good point. I guess the same fate will befall mine before too long.☹
Thanks John
thanks for the interesting video, I always wanted to see the bricks inside. hair looks cool, are you going for a rock star type look?.
I found some “storage” heaters used a cross-flow fan at the bottom to blow the heat out = they found these to be more efficient if they over-insulated the top of the unit ~ without the thermostatic flap thing that heat leaked out of, as heat rises, and having the bottom open. The heating element/s and bricks would be mounted on a bracket-bar and a air-gap at the front, top & back of the insulation and bricks. The air would often be drawn through a dust filter to stop dust from depositing on the bricks and “burning” on them, then flowing up the back>over the top>down the front to the fan. The “booster” element was above the fan and only was turned on in the evening when the bricks were almost depleted of heat. There would be 2 thermostats; 1 to heat the bricks at the desired temperature, and the other to turn the fan on with the room temperature and a booster switch to turn on the “booster” element with the fans thermostat.
I disconnected multiple storage heaters on behalf of an asbestos removal company for the council. They all appeared to be the same model of heater. It turned out that some did contain asbestos and some didn’t. Don’t know if they were from different batches or some were newer than they appeared. They were freestanding with the wood effect front that was painted onto the metal.
Yeah as someone mentioned before you forgot to mention the fusable link can go 167° and you can buy separately and do not need to replace the whole thermostat assembly. Dimpled have a thermal reset
I remember some people removing the 20amp switch and putting sockets on instead so they could run their appliances from the off peak board back when the storage heaters had a mechanical time switch and only the heaters would use low rate and the rest of the installation was charged at normal rate .The only drawback is that they could only be used at night,which confused some people.
Best thing these days is use it to charge a battery off the cheap rate electric. Then use that during the day or even sell it back to the grid if you have the appropriate meter.
In the good old days cheap rate electricity was for storage heaters ONLY and if you dared to use the circuit for other purposes the supplier company would enter your property!!
If your house has a separate heating rate (as well as day+night), then sadly the electricity companies have cottoned on this. Storage heaters are consistent, so if you start wiring plug sockets in instead, the electricity company will notice the amount of electricity you use on the heating circuit suddenly changing!
Yes ,they weren't happy about it from what I have been told.
@@Ed.R Now on Agile tariff and Octopus have disabled the timer in the smart meter so I can activate the storage heaters whenever there is cheap electricity available.
Remember fitting these by the hundreds in the mid to late 80’s as an apprentice! We used to have competitions on carrying packs of blocks up to the local authority flats. Managed 7 packs in one go, and quickly realised on the 3rd level How the hell I was going to open the door or put them down without smashing lol
Great information, thank you 👍
Great video John
I can't believe how basic the set up is! I thought there was way more magic going on inside those!😂
You’d think, right?! But of course they’re from the 60s, and it’s not like that was a high tech age.
@@JasperJanssenWell, high-tech enough to put people on the moon...
@@JasperJanssen this type was made from the 1980s
@@andysims4906 sure, but it’s basically the same design as the originals.
@@JasperJanssen very true
I'm in Heating zone 7 and use some 1960's steffes/Stiben heaters connected to Off-peak electric.The only problem is that the elements are failing. I am planing on changing to a large storage tank system with hydronic heating and thermal solar.
Perfect for every other country in the world, as everywhere has cheaper electricity than us.
Some I had to take apart for a flat refurbishment were old old and huge. Hate to guess when they might have been manufactured and installed. The bricks were very obviously the same sort of high alumina content material that refractory fire brick for furnaces are made from. They had semi-circular channels moulded in them down which naked NIC80 or similar coils ran, suspended from bars that doubled as both support and current supplying bus bar. Three sets hanging down between 4 layers of bricks front to back. Horribly inefficient, so much so that despite the Economy7 supply and tariff they were dreadfully expensive to run (this was late 80s/early 90s). It took two of us all day to disassemble, dismount and remove four from the first and second floors but we were glad to put the work in to see the back of the damned things!
Like the need for heat resistant cable, ceramic choc blocks for the elements, but plastic for the supply - nicely browning in the heat!
Solar heat stores (immersion heaters) have come back, but doubt a rooftop solar inverter could supply enough current for an effective heat system (even a simple resistive load).
Not sure, I've seen deliberately brown choc-block used in things before, but you could well be right.
From what I've heard they were often more expensive to run heating in workplaces than using plug-in heaters during peak time electricity. This is mainly due to older buildings having poor insulation and these heaters heating 24Hr/day instead of the 9 to 10 hours the building is occupied. Having worked in a few buildings that had storage heaters, they were difficult to regulate, especially if one night it was frosty and then 10C overnight the next, after increasing the input dial.
I have a larger one in my conservatory. I stopped using it when electricity prices shot up, and used a cheap diesel heater instead. But I'm back to using it again, as I'm only paying 7p kwh at night now. The only problem is, I tend to spend my time in there, in the evenings, so the heat is mostly waisted during the day.
Storage heaters may find a niche again now that fossil fuels are being phased out and insulation standards are improving.
If you have a small dwelling that is very well insulated and has little outside space (like most flats) these could be perfect. You would not have space for a wet heat pump system. A well insulated dwelling with a reasonable thermal mass requires a steady trickle of heat to keep up a stable comfortable temperature. If you size the storage heater generously (which wouldn’t mean big, given good insulation) then a reasonably stable temperature can be achieved 24 hrs with off peak electricity, such as through the Octopus Go tariff.
There are plenty of 16 amp timers available to wire them up. Gone are the days of radio controlled twin supply meters. Chose your tariff, and set your timer accordingly (for now....).
Dwellings in the 1960’s/70’s were barely insulated at all. They required high output heaters when people were in the building, and were probably best left unheated when unoccupied. This really did not suit storage heaters. But well insulated dwellings to modern standards do.
With more offshore wind on the way we might have more disparity between supply and demand, and a greater differential between peak and off peak prices. It is hard to predict how much this will be offset by car charging and other new uses.
If more tariffs like Agile Octopus become available (with very flexible pricing according to supply and demand on the grid) then storage heaters could become even more useful. We would need switches that could be controlled live. But the storage heater will always be sitting there ready for the supply (at least in the cold months) whereas the electric car may not be sitting on the drive.
These old storage heaters are being phased out because apparently they can't be installed under new regs. All new heaters must have sufficient points with regards to energy efficiency. Problem with it is that now a storage heater costs close to a grand and even a basic panel heater is £200 - 300.
Which is pretty funny considering electric heat is already basically 100% efficient. But sure, heat pumps are more efficient.
And if someone really wants a heat storage unit, pour floors with radiant heat and dump heat into it with a heat pump.
@Lagittaja It's got more to do with things like open window detection, better heat retention for storage heaters, fan heat distribution and programmable timers. Things that apparently reduce energy consumption by the heater not really the actual efficiency of the heater itself.
I had them for a while. You need an accurate weather forecast. If the day turned unexpectedly warm, you had to sweat or open the windows
Thanks for sharing 👍
The first time you heat one of these up from new they absolutely STINK!!
Reminds me of when the electrician fitted one in every room of a house and left them running. Place still smelt of burnt paint weeks later. Put a decent load on the electric supply to as the meter tails were noticeably warm.
Same with a new oven/grill. It's the protective coating on the elements that has to be burned off.
I'm thinking of getting one to divert my solar surplus and 7p night rate into using my Eddi 2nd output , using an oil filled at the moment but this would hold heat for longer
If doing that, get an old storage heater as all of the new ones require 2 supplies and have electronic thermostats, fans and whatever else in them.
So the ones with the fan have a seperate element and air just blows thru that part?
They speed up airflow through the bricks. But some units had a small fan heater built in for the afternoon boost when the bricks have cooled down.
@@bigjd2k Yeah I have a vague memory of the wall connection plates for these units, which had a "Main" supply fed from the Economy 7 switch and a "Boost" supply fed from the standard socket circuit so that the booster could still be used in on-peak times.
Yikes …..I haven’t seen a storage heater in donkeys years, I used to install these back when i was an apprentice Electrician in and around 1979 they were quite popular form of heating
Woke up to my storage heater smoking and very hot is this because the thermostat didnt cut in.
Thank you…..
Grab enough of those off the curbside on garbage day and you will be able to pave your driveway for free!
how does his microphone make him sound like he's in a crawlspace even when he's outside ?
This outside space has a plastic roof above it.
Our house has 3 Dimplex storage heaters which we use as our main heating (we also have a Corona paraffin heater which we use in autumn/spring) - our Dimplexes have a sort of tube/probe thing which dangles from the bottom right, and attached by a seemingly slightly flexible metal wire and it seems to be related to the thermostat - what precisely is this probe-thing and how does it work (and what are the failure situations of it)
That is what was sold as an 'automatic' storage heater - the probe is the end of a thermostat, which senses room temperature and adjusts the heat input control accordingly. They work up to a point, but as with everything storage heater related they are not particularly accurate so actual results will vary.
The thin wire is actually a tube, the end probe and the tube are filled with liquid which expands/contracts as the temperature changes, and the pressure of that liquid is what adjusts the thermostat control. Similar principle to thermostats used in ovens and fridges. The probe should be located near the floor at the back of the heater so it is only affected by the air temperature and not by heat from the heater.
If they fail, it's either thermostat on permanently or off permanently, so the heater will be far too hot, or won't heat up at all.
@@jwflame Thanks, that’s informative - it sounds incredibly Heath-Robinson to the point I’m amazed it got out of the door as a technical solution! I’m going to take a closer look at ours (probably next spring when we’re not using them daily)
One of the worst things ever invented. Took them straight out when my Mum moved into a Bungalow. Never hot in evening. Boiling in the middle of the night. Then on when the weather goes mild and wasting money. Complete rubbish.