Is an electric heater cheaper than the central heating?
Usually not. This is the most expensive myth in home energy, and the numbers are not close.
Typical model is rated 2,000W
Price cap is 26.11p
52p per hour, 600 hours a year, 1,200 kWh in total — about £26 a month. Costed over 150 days, not the whole year — this is a winter appliance.
Every plug-in electric heater — fan, oil-filled, halogen, convector, the expensive designer ones — is exactly 100% efficient. All of them turn one unit of electricity into one unit of heat. There is no such thing as an energy-saving electric heater, whatever the box says. The only differences are how the heat is distributed and how quickly you feel it.
The problem is the price of the fuel. Electricity is 26.11p per kWh against 7.33p for gas — roughly three and a half times as much. A gas boiler wastes perhaps 15% of what it burns and is still far cheaper per unit of heat delivered.
So heating one room electrically beats heating the whole house with gas only when the room is genuinely small, you are in it for a couple of hours, and the rest of the house would otherwise have been warmed for no reason. Run a 2kW heater all evening every evening and you will pay more than the central heating you were avoiding.
The short answer: Never cheaper per unit of heat. Only worth it for short bursts in one room, and a heated throw beats it outright.
What actually helps
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This is the small stuff
Every appliance on this site put together is usually less than a third of a typical energy bill. Heating the house is the rest of it. If the numbers here bothered you, the number that actually matters is what your heating costs — and whether a heat pump would make it better or worse in your particular house.
Work out your heating costOther appliances
Energy figures checked 2026-08-26. Electricity priced at the Ofgem cap for 1 July – 30 September 2026. Your own machine and tariff will differ — put your figures in above.