Electric heat storage (Night Storage Heaters)

Electric Storage Heating

Storage heaters and the environment

Storage heaters are the most environmentally friendly type of heating there is.

They are 100% efficient: all the energy used is converted into heat, and all of this heat goes into the room. Their efficiency does not get less as they get older.
They do not produce anything except heat, and in particular they do not themselves produce any carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, although greenhouse gases may have been produced by the power company supplying the electricity. You can of course choose your energy supplier.
When a storage heater does eventually come to the end of its life anyone with a screwdriver can dismantle it. The steel frame can be taken to pieces and recycled, the heating elements, cables and electronics can be taken to the electronics recycling centre, the insulation (an inert plastic-free non-toxic mineral substance) can be put into a single ordinary black rubbish sack, and what you do with the bricks, by far the biggest part, is limited only by your own imagination: bookends, door stops, stepping stones on a lawn, whatever you like. (When I was teaching I used to give my students a homework assignment: make a list of uses for an ordinary house brick. Most managed at least fifty; many managed more than two hundred, including an emergency water supply for a tadpole - I think that this boy remembered me saying that the correct name for the indentation on the top of a housebrick is a frog!)
Most of all they are future-proof - this is discussed on the next Page.

The Government and many environmental groups talk a lot about the environmental advantages of new systems such as heat pumps over current gas-fired central heating systems, but many of the technologies and infrastructures needed do not yet exist - and in any case storage heaters are quite at home in all of them - see next Page.