Electric Heating Systems

We get asked this question a lot - and we love answering it. Cost is clearly a deciding factor in purchasing electrical appliances and the question itself shows the industry is failing to educate people about energy-efficiency.

A more common variant of the same question is "Why are energy-saving light-bulbs so expensive?" The question even holds the clue to its own un-picking.

Yes, the modern energy-saving bulb is expensive, because it is not the same as the old energy-guzzling tungsten filament bulbs of yesteryear. Tungsten bulbs are basically (no insult to Thomas Eddison intended) a blob of glass, a bit of metal and an inert gas. They are very cheap to buy nowadays because we can bang them out ten to a penny. That's where the "good news" stops.

Tungsten bulbs last a short time because light is basically the secondary output of passing a high current through a high resistance wire (the primary output of which is actually heat.) Consequently these bulbs are very expensive to run (90% of their power consumption produces heat as opposed to light) and they are relatively fragile (they go "phut" very quickly).

Low energy light bulbs are complex, flourescent tubes with solid-state electronics that govern their illumination and running. They are not the same beasts as Eddison's invention. And at the moment, they are "expensive" only relative to the purchase cost of the old tungsten bulbs. However - and here is the rub - you will save on average £40 per bulb over the lifetime of an energy-saving bulb versus the running cost of a tungsten equivalent. How does this make them more expensive? They are far, far, far cheaper. You have to look at "total cost of ownership" and not just "purchase cost".

Exactly the same argument applies to Infrared Heating. I will fully admit that the modern materials and technology that makes Infrared Heaters very very reliable over their entire lifetimes and allows them to be 70% more energy-efficient than other forms of heater looks like a "barrier" to purchase. But they are so cheap to run that over even a five year period, you will have saved the purchase cost of the unit and still be left with a reliable heater. The same cannot be said, for example, for oil burners, which are relatively cheap to purchase (total heating requirements of a building considered) but are more expensive to run and also decay markedly after year 3. See the previous post "How to calculate power consumption for Infrared Heating Vs other forms of heating" for the comparative formulae.

So the answer is "the question is wrong". Infrared Heaters are not expensive. They are very, very cheap.