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Modern Storage Heaters. Is this true?

"One of the biggest issues with traditional storage heaters is the amount of heat lost before use. This leads to an insufficient amount of heat left at the point of intended use. Savit have overcome this issue by wrapping Aerogel, one of the best insulators available, around the core to prevent heat loss. The heat brick's shape, size and materials have also been redesigned to better retain heat. The fan has now been made larger which allows it to run quieter and at half the speed whilst providing the same level of output.

By heating the room in two ways, the majority of heat is released using the built-in fan that pushes heated air out from the grille at the bottom of the heater. A small amount of heat is dispersed through natural convection and radiation from the heater's case. With the amount of energy released through the heater's case significantly reduced, the surface temperature is kept low and retains as much heat as possible until the heater is in active use."

B. Gullible, Sevenoaks. Kent.

  • There's some logic in there I think (if perhaps slightly obscured by marketing speak) - certainly the old storage heaters of my youth that ran hot from early morning to mid-afternoon regardless how much heat the room actually needed (depending on the weather etc) were woefully inefficient overall despite electrical resistive heating bit being 100% efficient of itself. A move to better insulated heater with a fan to extract the heat when wanted was a significant improvement (first introduced many decades ago now). The latest storage heaters (LOT 20) now employ a whole raft of  time, weather and environment compensation techniques to try and squeeze the last few percent efficiency gains out of them.

       - Andy.

  • And Aerogel is really cool stuff,

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeJ9q45PfD0&t=75s

    even how they make it is clever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel

    A given thickness is 4 to 5 times more thermally insulating than kingspan (so an inch of aerogel is ~ 120mm of polyurethane or 250mm of rockwool. )Right now it is far too hard to make cheaply, but I suspect it is only a matter of time as processes are refined.

    And of course it is fireproof.

  • Storage heaters do what they say on the tin - store heat; but they also dispense it so if they can do that in a controlled way, so much the better. Keeping the surface temperature cool improves safety - people have been seriously injured by radiators when they have fallen against them and been unable to get up.

    Against that is the consumption of the fan, which is presumably, pretty small.

  • So that we know what we're talking about I'm assuming this is actually referring to these: https://www.dimplex.co.uk/quantum - this isn't marketing as I can't make any comment as to how good or otherwise these are! (The words in the OP are very close to those in the description of the Quantum heaters here https://asterwebsite.blob.core.windows.net/asterwebsite/existing_customers/Aster-Heating.pdf )

    It would be no great surprise if storage heaters have moved on from the very basic - and pretty useless - things I used to use in the mid 1980's (basically IIRC not much more than bricks with an electric element down the middle of them?), IF you have an off-peak tariff.

    The one place I did think a storage heater would be useful was when we used to have an old camper van - while we were driving the cooling system was barely good enough to stop the engine overheating, then we would sleep in the cold, and it always seemed like there should be a solution to this...but of course installing a pile of bricks to capture the heat from the coolant wouldn't have done much for the fuel consumption!!

    Cheers,

    Andy