I’ve posted previously on storage heater removal. These were the last two. A little more detail this time. If you’ve never removed a storage heater then you won’t know what a right royal pain the backside it is.
Here is the offending heating device in an upstairs bedroom:
First job is to remove the front cover by removing many screws from all round the front edge:
This reveals the firebricks – heavy lumps. You can’t lift more than one of these in each hand!
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As the house currently has no central heating, or heating at all for that matter, this was a job I have been really looking forward too. We’d looked around the net for stoves and found a nice contemporary model which would fit the existing opening in what will eventually become the kitchen snug.
Here’s the existing opening with stove drawn on for size and then stripped out:
The bigggest job of fitting this stove was to feed the flue pipe down through the existing chimney and into the fireplace. I had bruises on my shoulder for a week from this job:
You can see in the last picture the slate tiled hearth made for stove. Again a building regs requirement.
Finally a couple of pics of the stove installed and working. If you don’t have one of these you must get one. If we ever move house again this will be one of the first things we install!
After the large (£800!) electric bill we received the storage heaters around the house had to go.
Disconnecting the electrics was the easy part. All the heaters were connected into an ‘off peak’ fusebox. With luck there was nothing else in this fuse box so once this was split from the main consumer unit the whole box could go.
Removing the actual heaters was much more of a problem. Having not removed any before I wasn’t aware of the weight of these things. I though, ‘just unscrew it from the wall and carry it away, job done’. The first part of this worked, however carrying it away was never going to happen. I didn’t realise these things are full of fire brick each one weighing a tonne. So, removed the cover from each heater and then removed the bricks one by one before carrying the case out seperately.
And one gone:
