Stupid Question Time

Resident

Resident

Resident

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With all the talk of solar panelling with batteries I've had what may be a stupid idea based on an old heating system type.

Growing up, whilst our family home was undergoing some renovations we lived in a temporary house that was heated by electric storage heaters. For those not familiar they were concrete blocks heated up electrically overnight combined with an electric tariff were price per Kw was fractions of the day rates.

So my stupid idea. Would it be possible to install a battery storage system that was charged by mains overnight and used during the day, obvisously with mains backup at the ready. Cheaper overnight tariffs would mean a drop in costs and as not everyone would be doing this, the daytime loading would be less on the grid, which might lower costs further.

This probably makes no sense and probably wouldn't work right ?
 
I thought the whole point of storage heaters it that you hear them up at night on cheap electric then slowly release the heat the next day.

They are basically acting like a battery anyway.
 
So to summarise. Not a stupid thought and already in practical use. :cry:

BUDFORCE said:
I thought the whole point of storage heaters it that you hear them up at night on cheap electric then slowly release the heat the next day.

They are basically acting like a battery anyway.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's how the operated.
 
Resident said:
So to summarise. Not a stupid thought and already in practical use. :cry:



Yes, that's how the operated.
Click to expand...

Yup but....why would you get a battery to charge up at a cheap night rate, to then charge your storage heaters, when you can just "charge" your storage heaters?




EDIT URRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHH FAIL

Sorry, you are not trying to charge storage heaters, simply making a reference to how a battery would work like a storage heater.
 
Economy 7 is pretty dead these days and 'cheap' overnight rates are not much cheaper than day rates.

For this to work you need to be on the Octopus Go tariff which does give much cheaper overnight rates however it's meant to be only for EV owners and apparently they are more strict on checking this now. There is no guarantee how long the cheap rate will exist either so it's a risk spending several £k on a home battery install and then finding these favourable tariffs are no longer available.
 
The cost of enough battery storage to do that would take considerable time to pay off, and that is assuming you even could find a good tariff these days as mentioned above stuff like economy 7 has largely been binned off.

We used to have these monstrous brown storage heaters when I was a kid - from what I can make out probably a version of the Electra Ayrmatic though bigger dimensions than what I can find online which is limited to some props used for film ( https://trevorhowsam.com/thbsrb01-storage-radiator-electra-brown-metal-x-3/ ). Around 3 foot high, 4 foot long and 12-18 inches wide. I'd stick a couple of blankets on top so I could comfortably sit on them to keep warming while reading a book in winter. From reading up now they probably contained asbestos - great.
 
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