Energy prices are on the rise, with the average cost of heating a UK home being around £453.24 per year. To put that in perspective, the average cost of powering a UK home is about £1042. That’s 43% of your total energy bill! And with increasing wholesale costs and shifts in taxes, that number is only going to go up.

Thus, more and more people are looking at how they heat their home. There’s a very real possibility that in the near future, homes will be heated entirely by electrical sources, which are entirely carbon neutral, and can be powered through natural energy sources, beating rising gas prices.

Heat pumps have been a popular talking point in the news recently. These are a great option- if you can afford the initial cost of entry. Without government subsidies, which only a handful of people qualify for, these can easily cost you anything between £6,000-18,000 depending on the size of your home.

We’d recommend an alternative way: using electric infrared heating panels. At a glance, these may seem to be more expensive than a central heating system, but there’s a few ways that IR panels could wind up saving you a fortune!

One option is to choose an energy supplier that makes use of renewable sources of energy. Not only can this work out cheaper in the long term, it also ensures your home’s heating is entirely carbon neutral.

However, if you combine energy-efficient IR panels with domestic solar power you could find yourself saving even more! Here’s some details as to how.

The Benefits Of Solar

More and more people are considering solar panels as an option for home heating, and when you consider how efficient IR panels are, they suddenly become a lot more viable, since there is very little potential for wasted energy.

In practical terms, solar power is sold to the grid at around 4-5p per unit. By contrast, a unit of electricity bought from the grid will cost you around 14-17p. Thus, if you use a unit of electricity generated by a solar panel, your home will save 3x the value of purchasing a unit from the grid.

In average UK weather conditions, you can expect one kilowatt of panels to generate between 700 and 900 units (kilowatt-hours, kW/h) of electricity per year. On average then, a 3.5kW south-facing domestic system will produce about 3000kW/h per year.

An IR panel will use between 0.29 – 0.8 kW/h. You can turn on IR panels independently of each other, and they work best when heating you directly, so you’ll only need to have a few on at a time.

Taking the average of 0.54kW/h, let’s assume you use your combined panels for 12 hours a day for 365 days a year. That’s a total of 2,387kW/h per year, meaning you should be able to comfortably cover your heating needs with energy to spare.

What About Winter?

It’s true that in the UK we enjoy far less sun during the winter months, but this does not make solar power unviable. It can massively offset heating costs during spring and autumn months, where heat demands and solar power are evenly matched. This will still massively reduce your heating costs, if not eliminate them entirely.

In addition, while battery storage for solar power is still developing, it is becoming a more and more viable means of holding onto electricity until you need it. There are also new diverter technologies in development, such as Sharp and SolarEdge that intelligently route surplus power into your home.

At the moment, therefore, we’d recommend using home solar panel to supplement either another source of renewable energy (such as wind turbines) or in conjunction with an energy supplier that can supplement your energy production during winter months.

We’d advise speaking to a qualified renewable energy provider to discuss how viable certain types of energy are in your location.

The Benefits Of IR Panels

We’ve put together this handy guide as to how IR panels can save energy in your home that really gets into the brass tacks of the money-saving potential of this exciting new technology.

There are loads of reasons that IR heaters are more efficient compared to convection heaters, from the fact they use a more direct process known as radiant heating, to the fact that they can be switched on and off independently of each other so there’s no wasted heat, and that our most up-to-date Lot20 compliant NXTGEN heaters are intelligently designed to maximise their efficiency.

For an added convenience factor, IR heaters are really simple to install and maintain!

If you’re ready to take the next step in reducing your heating bills, get in touch. You can give our team a call today on 0116 321 4124 to find the right panel for you or send us an email at sales@suryaheating.co.uk.

You can also check out our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages for some inspiration or head over to our YouTube channel to learn more about Infrared Heating.