Is it cheaper to turn on my central heating or use a fan heater for one room?

I am retired and spend most days alone at home. I try to avoid turning on the heating during the day to save money, but sometimes the cold really bothers me.

I’m not on the poverty line, but I lose my winter fuel payment and have to keep my energy bills down.

I spend most of my time in the living room. Would it be cheaper to turn on the central heating for a while to warm up, or use a fan heater that I just need to heat that room?

My house is a two bedroom Victorian terrace and has no insulation except in the attic. My fan heater is 2 kW and I have a 30 kW combi boiler.

This Is Money’s Sam Barker replies: The cold weather is well and good here, and with it higher energy bills.

Ofgem’s energy price cap, currently £1,717 per year for average energy use, will rise by 1.2 per cent to £1,738 on January 1, 2025.

I’m also sorry to hear that you are losing your winter fuel payment, which was worth up to £300 per pensioner last winter.

According to the Energy Saving Trust, more than half of the average household’s energy bill is spent on heating and hot water.

Questions about heating are among the most frequently asked questions at This is Money.

Unfortunately, they are also almost impossible to answer with a high degree of accuracy because every home is different.

How much you pay for energy, your appliances, how cold you get and even the length of the pipes in your home all make a difference.

I’ve done some rough calculations, which show that it’s much cheaper per hour to use a fan heater than central heating – but with some very important caveats.

Ultimately, the decision between a fan heater and central heating is a personal choice. The figures I am going to make are a very blunt way of approaching the issue, which should really be approached as a compromise between heat, costs, the state of repair of your home and how you live in it during the winter months.

For example, a 2 kW fan heater would cost 49 cents to run for an hour, assuming you participate in the typical capped price energy agreement, where rates for electricity units are capped at 24.5 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) .

By comparison, your 30 kW combi boiler should cost £2.06 to run your central heating for an hour, assuming you pay 6.24 cents per kWh for capped rate gas and your boiler is 90 per cent efficient .

So if you are only in one room, it is much cheaper to use your fan heater than to turn on the central heating. In fact, it would be cheaper to use your fan heater to heat one room and then bring the heat to another room and heat it, than to turn on your central heating.

However, this is not entirely a fair comparison.

Your fan heater will obviously only heat one room for 49p per hour, while that figure of £2.06 would be approximately the cost of heating all your radiators in multiple rooms.

You can of course switch off some of your radiators, reducing the amount of € 2.06 per hour.

But heating more than one room has clear benefits, both for you and for the well-being of the property itself.

Heating is important to keep rooms dry and prevent the formation of damp and mold, which also costs money to repair and can even make you sick. As you are no doubt aware, Victorian homes can be prone to this.

One good thing about central heating is that heat also radiates from the pipes, even if there is insulation. This means that much more of the house is heated than just the parts near radiators.

The heat from a radiator also lingers longer than that of a fan heater because the metal of the radiator retains heat, just like any nearby masonry.

Danielle Michalska-Morris, group technical innovation manager at David Wilson Homes, said: ‘While electric blankets and space heaters may be cheaper to run in the short term, it is important to remember that they only heat one part of the home and that they shouldn’t do that. leave on for a long time.

‘Leaving electric heaters on all day is not profitable. For example, a 2 kW fan heater costs about 49 cents per hour when running at full power. If you used it for four hours each evening the total would cost £1.96, and over the course of a week it could rise to £13.72.

‘For comparison, it costs around £2 for a 24kW gas boiler to heat the whole house, so you need to consider which option suits you best at the time.

‘For those who feel cold, a traditional hot water bottle is a good alternative to electric blankets and space heaters, meaning you only have to boil the kettle.’

How much do fan heaters cost to use?

Each appliance has a rated power, usually expressed in watts (W) or kilowatts (kW), where 1,000 W is equal to 1 kW.

This tells you the amount of electricity it uses – and how much it costs depends on how long it’s on.

Electricity is sold per kWh, which usually appears as ‘units’ on your bill.

You can calculate how much an electrical appliance costs to run by multiplying the wattage of the appliance by the number of hours you use it and then by the electricity costs.