You can read our review and description of how Infra Red Heating Panels work and how they can be used as an efficient, low cost form of heating on our Infrared Heating Panel Review page. However if you have already purchased one of these Infrared panels and now wish to work out the actual physical cost of running these Infrared panel heaters then please read on.
The ‘per hour’ cost of running Infrared heating panels depends on two main variables, namely the Electrical power consumption of the heating panels (often expressed in “Watts” or “W” for short), and the actual cost of a unit (kw/h) of Electricity. The power consumption can often be found either on the Infrared heating panel itself, or in the instruction manual, whilst the cost of a unit of electricity can be found on your latest Electricity bill.
Once you have this information, you can accurately work out exactly how much it costs to run your Infrared Heating Panels. (Don’t worry if you don’t have this information to hand, as I give some rough estimates of running costs further down)
So, taking the wattage of your Infrared Panel Heater, and the cost of a unit (kw/h) of electricity, we can work out the running cost, using a simple maths equation
Most panels will give their power rating in “Watts” and 1000 Watts would equal 1kw. So a rating of 500 watts would equal 0.5kw, a rating of 35o watts would equal 0.35kw and 200w would be 0.2kw etc.
So now we know this, lets use the following equation to work out the running cost of a given heating panel
(Total running cost) = Rating (in kw) x number of hours running x Electricity Cost (in £)
So taking a 500 watt (0.5kw) infrared heating panel and an Electricity cost of 11p per unit (KW/h), we can now work out the running cost…..
0.5 kw x 1 hour running x £0.11 = £0.055 per hour, or 5.5p per hour
Lets also use the same equation to work out the cost of running a 700w Infrared Panel Heater, at a cost of 12p per unit (KW/h)
0.7 kw x 1 hour x £0.12 = £0.084 per hour, or 8.4p per hour
If you don’t know how much you pay for a unit of Electricity, or maths give you a headache then I have listed the running cost of most popular infrared panel heaters below, using an average Electricity cost of 12p per unit (average electricity cost as of Nov 2013)
200w Infrared Heating Panel – Running Cost = £0.024 (2.4p) per hour
350w Infrared Heating Panel – Running Cost = £0.042 (4.2p) per hour
400w Infrared Heating Panel – Running Cost = £0.048 (4.8p) per hour
500w Infrared Heating Panel – Running Cost = £0.06 (6p) per hour
600w Infrared Heating Panel – Running Cost = £0.072 (7.2p) per hour
750w Infrared Heating Panel – Running Cost = £0.09 (9p) per hour
800w Infrared Heating Panel – Running Cost = £0.096 (9.6p) per hour
1000w Infrared Heating Panel – Running Cost = £0.12 (12p) per hour.
Please note that these running costs are only estimated based on an Electricity cost of 12p per unit, for a more accurate cost, you should refer to your latest electricity bill to obtain the current cost of Electricity and use the equation given above.
