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We have a similar system here in the U.K. with the "Economy 7" tariff which gives cheap power at night, except that it doesn't use a separate pilot wire for the contactor.

Traditionally, we have a timeclock installed alongside the meter which (a) energizes the contactor for water/space heating and (b) switches the meter to the low rate. Increasingly though, the timeclock is being replaced by a radioteleswitch which serves the same purpose but is activated by way of an R.F. signal sent at the appropriate times.

Cheap rate is usually midnight - 7 a.m. in winter, 1 a.m. - 8 a.m. in summer (hence "Economy 7" - 7 hours of cheap-rate power).

Austria typically employs two separate meters and a radioteleswitch rather than dual tariff meters. Makes for quite a chunky meter enclosure...

Some areas traditionally have water heaters (150l and up) on the night meter, there the night meter is usually single phase with a separate RCD and 16 amp breaker. Night storage space heating usually gets a 3x35A service but I don't think a system like that has been installed anywhere during the last 30 years. They were insanely popular during the late 1960s and 1970s though, particularly in new construction. Now people have a huge problem upgrading to any other heat source since these houses don't even have a chimney (and burners vented straight through the wall are illegal at least in Vienna).

My family considers buying a house with a night tariff hot water tank and the first thing we are going to do is throw it out.

Reason: we need to put in a central heating system anyway (right now the house has individual coal stoves supplemented by plug connected oil filled electric radiators), so the initial investment is more or less covered by the central heating, practically giving us a free new hot water source. The meter is 40 Euro/quarter, taking it out would thus save 120 Euro a year. Besides, even with the soaring prices gas is still considerably cheaper than even night tariff electricity here.

Although rare for new builds, storage heaters are still used here as retrofits, mostly because of the easy and cheap installation.

I have night storage heaters throughout my own house, mostly because there were already a few installed with E7 when I moved here, so the quickest, easiest way at the time was to just add a couple more in the other rooms.

I don't like storage heating though, due to the lack of control. It's especially problematical now we're approaching autumn, when one day can be warm & sunny, the next cool, damp, & miserable.

Eventually I'd like to dump the storage heaters and run the usual hot-water heating system, but of course that's going to be a major job.



Is there an officially stated reason for that? The wall-vented balanced flue has become pretty much the norm for retrofit boilers here these days.

In Ireland storage heating was very popular in the 1960s - 1980s both as a retrofit and in new build. ESB (the power company) used to have "Gold Shield Home" branding in the 1980s. Before that it was just "The All-Electric Home".

http://www.esb.ie/main/energy_home/customer_gold.jsp

Depending on the era of installation it's done a few different ways.

The oldest installations had a dual-dial meter and a big electromechanical time clock which looked like an electricity meter. That activated the night-rate dial on the meter and also powered up the storage heaters.

Each heater than had settings on the top and an isolating switch on the wall beside it.

More modern installations use more digital metering and more sophisticated controls.

All-Electric heating fell out of favour as natural gas became more widely available in Ireland. You have to realise that we didn't have natural gas here until the 1980s. "Town Gas" made from oil/coal was around since the dawn of gas technology, but it was confined to larger towns and cities. As a result, most suburban homes built in the 1950s-1980s were heated with either pressure jet oil systems or electric storage heating.

The gas networks were vastly modernised and extended in the late 1970s/1980s when natural gas was discovered off the coast of Cork.

A very large % of the existing pressure jet oil systems converted over to natural gas and gas also replaced many of the electric systems too.

You can still find electric storage heating in apartments where the developer was too cheap to put in a gas fired hydronic system. Typically, you'll find them in student accommodation etc or in old houses where installing the plumbing for a gas-fired hydronic system was regarded as too distruptive.

The above link gives you the details and operating instructions for a 'gold sheild' all electric home

This is the control system that ESB usually install :

http://www.devi.ie/3535DD54-DEF0-4258-B623-AC009165EEB9.W5Doc

http://www.devi.ie/3535DD54-DEF0-4258-B623-AC009165EEB9.W5Doc

It anticipates the heat it needs to put into the storage heaters based on the outdoor temp etc.. quite a smart system.

None that I know of... it used to be legal in vienna but not in Lower Austria (i.e. in some cases just the next town), now it's just the other way round... gas code is made by the utility company and they have some rather weird requirements. A lot of them seems to be centered around driving out any old gas appliances as soon as they have any right to force it (usual code reuirement: as soon as anything is changed all non-compliant appliances have to be replaced). It doesn't really seem to work out - almost all gas related fatalities that made it to the media in recent times were due to lack of regular servicing and cleaning of combi boilers or water heaters and in each account the names of the victims seemed to indicate Eastern european immigrants who have a reputation for working around codes often.

Side note on Ireland: as you might know, natural gas is odorized, so a leak can be detected easily. It seems every country uses different substances to achieve this and Ireland obviously uses the same stuff as Italy uses for bottled LPG... so all the cheap hostel kitchens really reminded me of Italy holidays (with the constant replacing of bottles all the kitchens in Tuscany I ever saw had a slight gas smell to them).

Ireland obviously jumped the natural gas wagon even later than Austria where the town gas production already declined in the 1960s, rather natural gas was refined to town gas, and from 1970 to 1978 pretty much the entire distribution was changed over to natural gas. At the same time almost all old gas appliances were scrapped as most manufacturers didn't provide natural gas jets for old their burners.

I think Ireland must have been one of the very last places in Europe to get natural gas. The first supply came from Kinsale Head off the Coast of Cork in 1971 and it was only rolled out nationally very gradually, starting in Cork City.

Supplies in Dublin were only converted over to natural gas in the 1980s and most of the country didn't have natural gas at all.

Northern Ireland only got natural gas in the 1990s and into the 2000s. They had 'town gas' supplies, but when they were shut down they weren't replaced. There was a gap in service for several decades in many areas.

A state-owned corporation called Bord Gais Eireann (BGE) operates the network and is the dominant supplier in Ireland. It gradually purchased the local gas companies one-by-one as the went into liquidation in the 1970s and 80s. It is also very dominant in Northern Ireland through a subsiduary called Firmus Energy.

We've now got an interconnector to the UK with a spur to the Isle of Mann this is our sole connection to the European grid.

The Cork (Kinsale Head) field has almost run out. Although, there was a fairly significant discovery of gas off the west coast. However, the entire project's turning into a huge controversy as locals are protesting over the routing of gas pipes through their land. They want the gas refined off shore! There are also a lot of protesters who are angry about the way that Shell and other companies were given production rights.

They're also putting in a Liquified Natural Gas terminal near Limerick on the Shannon Estuary.

Energy supply's always a bit tricky when you're a relatively far flung island!!

We're still have no UK-Ireland electrical interconnection, other than a small-scale connection into Northern Ireland. So, effectively we're pretty much isolated from the European network.

Slightly off-topic but funny, none the less.
During my electrical apprenticeship, I got sent way out in the sticks to fix the oven in a shearing shed.
I made sure I had plenty of Simmer-stats and high-temperature wire with me.
When I got there, I almost did a double-take, what I was met with, was something that Noah may have used to cook on the Ark.

This oven was a very elderly storage range, with two hot-plates on top, made of cast iron, with concrete as the insulation in it, these things used to have to have a concrete pad poured under them because of their weight, these things weighed a tonne.

Anyhow, I managed to get the thing going, it was run off the Night-rate and heated up over night and would remain hot enough to cook on all day, provided you kept the huge covers on the hot-plates on the top.
One added bonus of these ovens, is that due to their design, they used to heat the room they were in as well.

I happened to be relating my travels to the Senior Inspector at work, when a huge grin ran across his face.
He told me that when he first started his time, the new electric ranges (as we know them now) were being installed in houses and the older storage ranges were being taken out and thrown away at the local tip.

One particular day, this guy and the electrician he was working with, were taking this storage range to the tip in the back of a mid 1960's Ford Escort van (Paul, can you help with a pic of this vehicle?), they made it to the last corner heading up to the tip when the electrician took the corner too sharply and the right side tyres blew and the vehicle tipped over on it's side, caused by the oven falling over in the back, no-one was hurt but I'm told it was rather hard to get the van back on it's wheels again!