If you can find out the times when the cheap rate power is on, you could turn the water on for the last ½ hour or so.

Yes, the storage heaters will store energy when power is cheap, at night, and let it out through the day. There should be two controls on the top - one for energy coming in, the other for heat coming out. To start with, you should put the heat coming in somewhere in the middle and the heat out on minimum. See how it goes and adjust accordingly but you should have the heat out control on minimum when the room is not in use. I leave the one in my flat on heat out = minimum all the time and just adjust the other control as it gets colder. When I turn the heat out control up any further, there is no heat left at the end of the day. When you first turn the storage heaters on, nothing will happen until they have taken some power in overnight.

You need to be aware that storage heaters cost less to run than standard electric heaters, but they are not cheap. You should keep an eye on your meters and your bills when you first start using them so that you can get an idea of how cozy you want to be.

I do not know about your bathroom heater. It's normal to have a standard fan heater, or similar, there with a pull cord inside the bathroom and sometimes there is an isolator switch and fuse nearby, just outside the bathroom.

Hi - We are 4 students living in a basement flat of a converted country house in Dundee. We are on the THTC tarriff. There are a few things i still don't quite get about it though.

First of all, do we have any control over the water heating? There is a switch, which we can set to "Off" or "Timer" but we don't really use a lot of hot water, as we have a power shower, so it's only really hand washing. We think that contributed to our last bill, which was only for 1 month's usage really, coming to £260. We have managed to cut that to £150 for the next month, but it's still a lot, especially as students!

Secondly, we have storage heaters in the hallway, but we have them completely turned off at the moment. Do they only come on to store heat at night time? It's starting to get quite cold and I feel we might be needing them soon, so we want to know the best way of using them.

We also have a small heater in the bathroom. It has a pull switch with a little red light on it. It's only at certain times that the light will actually come on when you pull the switch, and it never seems to give much heat. There are no other controls on it - it seems the only way for it to be any use is to leave the switch "on" overnight. If we're lucky, it has warmed a little by morning, but we have no idea how much electricity it's using.

If anyone can give us any clues, we'd be most grateful.

cheers

nathan