There are a few important things to understand about efficiency and running costs, and there's a lot of bad information posted on the internet. So read this carefully to make sure you fully understand!
All electric resistive heating is essentially 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat.
If a 1000W heater runs non-stop for an hour, it will use 1 kWh (kilowatt hour). Depending on your provider, that would cost about $0.24 cents.
Sounds high, right? But this isn't the full story...
The first thing to consider is that a heater rarely needs to run non-stop to keep a room warm. A heater equipped with an accurate thermostat (like Purmo electric radiators) will cycle on and off to maintain a consistent room temperature.
This means that the exact energy usage will be equal to the rate heat loss of your room. A poorly insulated room on a cold day will lose heat much faster than a well insulated room on warmer day. North-facing rooms that get lots of sunlight will consume less power than dark south-facing rooms.
Radiant heat means Purmo radiators are usually cheaper to run compared to other kinds of resistive electric heating (like convection-only panels).
This is because radiant heat feels more comfortable to people even if the air temperature is lower. It heats objects directly, and is lost less easily to draughts and air flow.
Many of our customers find they can set the thermostat a degree or two lower and still feel warm and cozy because of this effect.
Put simply, in a well-insulated home, or a home equipped with solar panels, Purmo panels are very cost efficient to run.
To get a rough idea of running costs, you can use the following rule of thumb.
On average across a winter season, Purmo panels will need to run 50% of the time when sized correctly for the room.
This means the average cost of running the 1000W radiator we talked about earlier comes to about $0.12 cents per hour that it's turned on.
Remember that this is a rough average that factors in usage on the coldest days of the year. Many of our customers find their actual running cost ends up much lower than this!
