Cold homes: Electric heating or gas boilers?

If you are living in the UK at the moment, you must understand how cold it is these days! We are in the first half of winter and it’s freezing cold. The cold winds from the Arctic are expected to bring temperatures down to -15C in the northern parts of the UK this week!

As a young professional working at home with a bunch of friends from university, day by day we are becoming more conscious of our energy usage at home. Last month, our energy bills tripled from the average monthly prices. Hence, we decided to turn off our automatically scheduled central heating (which are gas boilers) at home to see how much it could save our money.

The problem is some of us would then turn on those portable plug-in heaters (which are electric heating) instead. It made me wonder how which type of heating would actually be best to use this winter. Electric heating or gas boilers?

I thought these might be beneficial for those who don’t know so here are my findings.

Fan heater

The cost of running a 2000W fan heater we use at home is an average of 68p per hour.

Hence, turning on the fan heater for 4 hours a day, for example, would cost £0.68 x 4= £2.72 per day, or £2.72x 30= £81.7 per month.

Central heating

The cost for standard central heating (usually a 24kW gas boiler) is about 12p per hour.

Hence turning on the heater for 4 hours a day would cost £0.12 x 4 = £ £0.48 per day, or £0.48 x 30= £14.4 per month.

This is just a simple comparison with many other factors to consider, but I think I found my answer. Hence, based on this simple calculation, using the electric fan heater would cost 5 times more than central heating.

The energy prices are high but we also don't want people getting sick from the cold temperatures, so here is just a reminder (especially to my international friends who are accustomed to wearing thin clothes at home) to wear thicker clothes indoors if possible, and make sure to close the windows/ doors when to prevent cold breeze flow (draught) into the house. It's not wrong to turn on your heating at home to save energy but be mindful and learn to use your heating effectively (learn to set timers and lower down your default heating temperature).

(p/s: Shout out to Solarable project which is trying to design a solar-powered/renewable-energy-powered heated jacket to tackle the problem of cold homes in the UK. Hopefully, that project works and we could help a lot more people struggling through the cold winter!)