After more than a decade in various rented flats I have to say that I’m sick to the back teeth of living with electric storage heating, electric showers and immersion heating tanks. I know that from a landlord’s perspective they’re safer and require less maintenance than a gas boiler, radiators and a mixer shower, but enough is enough. The news is saying that this is the coldest winter in Scotland for ten years, and I can feel every negative degree of it in this flat.
It’s bad enough just now during the day when temperatures get up to about -2 or even freezing, but as soon as the sun goes down the temperatures are plummeting faster than Eddie the Eagle. Admittedly it’s nothing compared to what they’re used to in Scandinavia, but they also seem to know how to build houses that are warm in the winter. According to Google weather it’s currently -3°C here in Glasgow, and I can feel every prickly degree.
Having grown up in a house without central heating I’ve never been particularly bothered by the cold before. Usually I sleep more soundly, and it keeps a lot of the standard issue Glaswegian nutcases off the streets for a few weeks.
I’ve completely given up on attempting heating the flat with my storage heaters and have resorted to using a pair of halogen heaters instead. I’m sure in the fantasy land of the 1980s and 90s white meter heating made a lot of sense. Electricity prices were relatively low, and the future was all synth-pop and neon lights. I also suppose it’s also a lot cheaper to install when you’re renovating or building properties to run electrical cables for storage heaters under the floor than to install the pipes and boiler required for a central heating system. That however doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s ABSOLUTELY FUCKING USELESS. I don’t know how many of you reading this have every tried to use storage heating, but I consider it a nightmare.
The idea is sound I admit. The heaters run all night on the lower priced electrical rate and heat up a bunch of ceramic blocks or clay bricks. Then, when the electricity switches back to the day rate, a vent pops open and they start releasing this stored heat into the room. As the night rate is supposed to be substantially cheaper than the day rate this makes good economic sense.
That’s all fine and dandy, but in all the flats that I’ve lived in the storage heaters run all night racking up the electric meter, pop open about 7AM and all the heat is gone from the place by lunchtime. Now that’s marvellous if you’re an unemployed Jeremy Kyle viewing statistic, but when you’re leaving for work at 7AM and don’t get in till about 5PM you have to ask yourself, “what’s the point in running this shit all night?”
Admittedly my flat is also quite large compared to most one bedroom flats As it’s a converted warehouse it also has outlandishly high ceilings and huge sash and pelmet windows running along one side, but it still seems outrageously cold even compared to the landing outside. The heat seems to instantly rush out of the huge windows as soon as I turn off the two heaters, and I’m sure I’m burning far more electric than I would be in a more reasonably windowed place. I don’t suppose the people that did the conversion thought much about energy efficiency or even the mechanics of trying to heat the place.
The storage heating is bad, but it’s possible to work around it if you’re willing to put up with heaters lying all over the place, which I have been for the last couple of years. What really gets to me though is the total lack of hot running water.
In the flat I have an immersion heater tank which is just what it sounds like. A big copper tank with an electric element inside to heat up the water. It’s painfully slow to heat, hard on the electric while it’s working, and you have to fire it up long in advance of when you’ll actually need the hot water. Even if you do sit around waiting for it to heat up the pressure out of the hot tap is negligible, and takes ages to fill even a basin to do the dishes. Not that I would do the dishes, or anything else with the water, because the feeder tank that supplies cold water into the immersion tank looks like this inside:
I shudder to think what chthonian horrors are festering inside that thing.
The worst thing in all of this I think is electric showers. I loathe them, and I don’t actually think I can convey in words just how much I loathe them. Specifically I loathe the fact that the water pressure is inversely proportional to the heat of the water. They’re fine in the summer when the water coming through the pipes from the main is relatively warm and the shower doesn’t have to go up very high to heat it to a comfortable temperature, but in winter it’s a whole different story.
I’m contrasting this with my folk’s house which has a gas combination boiler that produces hot water on demand. They also have a mixer shower which can be fiddly to get a comfortable temperature in, but once properly set can be both warm and produce a very good water pressure. Conversely my flat has a Triton TX7000i electric shower, which oddly seems to be the shower of choice in rented accommodation, and it sucks donkey balls. This particular unit is designed for, and I quote, “light and occasional usage”. The one in my flat has already been replaced twice, and I remember the letting agent commenting about there being a problem with it before I moved in.
To get any kind of useful heat out of it, while it’s freezing outside and cold inside, I have to turn the control dial almost three-quarters of the way round. This results in a serviceable amount of heat, but virtually no water pressure to speak of. I have to crowd right under the thing and wash a third of my body at a time. It’s quite a contrast from the other day when I more or less blasted the top layer of skin off when I set my folks shower on too hard.
OK, rant over, now it’s time to start looking for a new place.
