Understanding the cost of using a radiator versus an electric heater is essential if you want to keep warm but keep costs down.
In our ongoing effort to save you money, we compared radiators and electric heaters to determine which is the cheapest way to heat.
Set your central heating to turn on regularly to keep your home warm when you wake up in the morning or come home, a luxury—as opposed to having to get out of a warm bed to turn on the heater or come home in a cold house.
If you install radiators in every room, don’t worry about getting colder in one of them – after all, every room in your house should be heated evenly.
If you’re not using the spare bedroom or any other room – you can easily turn off the radiator in the room you’re not using and close the door using smart heating controls and a timer on the thermostat.
According to Statista(opens in a new tab), three-quarters of homes use central heating for heating, but it’s not cheap if you want a quick fix.
Rosie McDonald, energy expert at the Energy Helpline(opens in a new tab), says that depending on the average 35kW household boiler, turning on central heating for an hour can cost you over £3.
This is usually the case for family homes, however, depending on the size of your home, you may have a much smaller boiler, such as 12kW or 24kW.
As a rough guide based on the price per unit of energy for dual fuel consumers, a kWh of gas costs 10.3p. This means a £12k 2.50 smaller boiler.
This means that if you want extra warmth in your living room while you watch TV or work in the office upstairs, turning the heat on for an extra hour is an expensive way to keep warm.
Temperature is also the key to saving money. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that home temperatures in the UK be around 18°C ​​in winter.
But in a recent Martin Lewis Twitter poll, most people voted that their heating temperature was over 18 degrees.
Today’s Twitter Poll: What temperature (in Celsius) is your main central heating thermostat set to? Ps It’s not about whether it’s on or not, but about setting the temperature when you turn it on. November 10, 2022
So consider lowering your thermostat 1 degree every 2 weeks to save on your energy bill.
When it comes to the cost factor – electric heaters – for example, this £30 small square heater from Dunelm (opens in a new tab) costs about 51p an hour.
It’s a 1500-watt electric heater – it might not be the most powerful heater on the planet, but it can put out quite a lot of heat when you need to quickly heat up a room.
The higher the wattage, the more expensive this 2500W electric heater(opens in a new tab) costs £59 to buy and 85p an hour to operate.
Of course, you can buy larger electric heaters that are usually portable enough to take with you, which can be handy if you’re the only family member working from home and if you just need to warm up quickly.
Heat from the radiator is not lost immediately when the heating is turned off, but when the electric heater is disconnected from the network, heat is lost quickly.
Another downside is that it can be more difficult to pre-set electric heaters at certain times of the day, unless you buy a timed plug, which you can get for around £5 at most DIY stores (opens in a new tab).
But if you get to the point where electric heaters are connected to every room, the cost can exceed the cost of central heating.
“It may seem convenient to heat a separate room with a portable electric heater, but the cost of operating an electric heater is much higher than the cost of a gas counterpart.
“For a rough comparison, if you have an electric heater in four rooms of the house, it is probably more expensive than using central heating, especially if you have a small house and a 12kW boiler.”
It all depends on whether you are heating one room or the whole house. Using the electric heater for an hour a day will set you back £3.57 per week, compared to about £21 if you turn on the central heating.
If you’re only using one room—working from home, for example—and need to heat up quickly, using an electric heater can save you money compared to running your central heating system.
Electric heaters are easy to use, require minimal maintenance and are easy to install (you just plug them in).
However, if you try to heat the entire house with an electric heater in every room instead of a radiator, it will cost more and not produce the same level of heat.
Whether you’re heating your entire house or a few rooms and using central heating is best, you can still keep costs down by doing a few small things:
If you don’t have an electric heater and don’t want to invest right now, there are a few other things you can do to heat only the rooms you need with central heating, which can save you up to £115.
Sue Hayward is a journalist, broadcaster and writer specializing in personal finance and consumer products. She often talks on TV and radio about how to get more money for your pound. Sue writes for various publications including the Guardian, i Paper, Good Housekeeping, Lovemoney and My Weekly. Cats, cheese and travel are Sue’s extracurricular hobbies!
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