Electrician in Greenhithe DA9 and Stone

Electric heating, on the board

One household in seven in DA9 has central heating that is electric and nothing else: 873 homes at the 2021 Census, 14.5% of the district, against 8.7% across England and 8.4% across Dartford borough. Most of it is in the flats. In the 13 output areas where most households live in purpose-built blocks, 448 of 1,602 homes, 28.0%, are heated by electricity alone, against 9.6% in the rest of the district. In a home like that the heating is part of the electrical installation, and that changes what an inspection looks at and what goes wrong. Storage heaters and panel heaters sit on circuits of their own, often fed from a separate section of the board or a second, smaller board, and storage heaters charge overnight on a cheaper rate through a meter that records two rates and switches the off-peak circuits on and off. Hot water usually comes from an immersion heater on another circuit with its own switch. All of it is heavy, steady load for hours at a time, the kind that finds a loose terminal or a cable that was never quite big enough. So the useful questions are plain ones. When a storage heater stays cold, the fault is as likely to be in the supply to it, or in the switching, as in the heater. When the bills are high, it is worth knowing which rate each circuit runs on. And when an old heater is replaced with a newer one, the circuit should be checked against the new heater’s rating rather than assumed to match.

Census 2021 is five years old. 'Electric only' means the household's only central heating is electric (storage heaters, panel heaters, electric boilers and similar); homes with two or more heating types are counted elsewhere. Summed over the output areas where most postcodes are in the district; small-area counts carry ONS's disclosure-control adjustments.