Discussion - Night Storage electric heating

Fr Dougal

Folks,
Have any of you rented a poperty with night storage heating?

I am looking at a property to buy and rent out. It's an 8 year old terraced 2bed Dormer house. However, it has night storage electric heating (2 meters).

Does this work out expensive to use? Would it put off potential tenants?

The house was quite warm and cosy both times we viewed it. Other than the heating, the house is fine and in an excellent location in a quiet courtyard in the sentre of town. (There is a question mark over the Management company but this is being investigated by my Solicitor)

Victor

Fr Dougal wrote:

Have any of you rented a poperty with night storage heating? I am looking at a property to buy and rent out. It's an 8 year old terraced 2bed Dormer house. However, it has night storage electric heating (2 meters). Does this work out expensive to use? Would it put off potential tenants?

The two meters thing is usual, one for daytime, one for nighttime. Nighttime heating benefits daytime home users more so than commuters. Being a terraced house improves the heat loss situation as your losses are your neighbours gains and vice-versa.

Electricity has the advantage of a single bill (no gas, oil, coal, etc.) but the disadvantage of being a little more expensive and being your only power source renders you vulnerable to supply disruption (less likely in a town).

Does it have a ESB Goldshield rating or similar?

The house was quite warm and cosy both times we viewed it.

All this means is that they had the heating cranked up to max.

Fr Dougal

Cheers Victor. Thanks for this and advice on the management company. We've stepped back and are going to look at a new house in a different development.

Victor

Oh, search for other posts on this topic here.

shoegirl

Its difficult to tell. My experience of storage heating is that its significantly more expensive than oil or gas, but cheaper than electrical only.

In my experience, storage or electric heating usually indicates the property owner didn't want to spend much on maintaining a more efficient central heating system. You may be better off looking for a centrally heated property - easier to let with oil or gas, and probably easier to maintain if something goes wrong.

Borzoi

shoegirl wrote:

and probably easier to maintain if something goes wrong.

Despite my antipathy for storage heating - one of the few advanteges it does have is in reliability. The only thing to go wrong is the stats, which are not expensive components to replace. Furthermore if your gas/oil boiler packs up - your whole heating system is gone, but storage heating doesn't rely on a single component so you'll at least have some warmth if a heater packs in.