Electric Heating
Reframing electric heating
Yulia Gillingham, head of marketing at Dimplex UK, explains why customer experience now leads the sale.
E
volving customer experience is reshaping perceptions of electric heating - and wholesalers and installers have an important role to play in challenging outdated assumptions. For a long time, electric heating has held a reputation that still shapes conversations today. For many customers, perceptions are based largely on the old storage heaters that were difficult to control, often released heat at the wrong times and offered little visibility over energy use. Those views are not misplaced because they quite rightly reflect the previous generation of technology.
Today, what has changed is the technology itself - modern high heat retention storage heaters (HHRSHs) have been developed to address those historic issues, combining improved insulation with much greater controllability and more responsive performance. Dimplex Quantum, for example, retains heat more effectively and releases it in line with user demand, rather than following the fixed patterns of older systems. This improved control and efficiency has been shown to reduce running costs by up to 27% compared with traditional storage heaters.
The challenge now is not necessarily capability, but rather how to change perception. While the technology has moved on, many of the assumptions surrounding electric heating have not. For wholesalers and installers, this creates an important role in helping customers reassess what electric heating can offer, particularly as
expectations around usability and cost control continue to rise.
Homeowners are no longer choosing heating systems purely on output, they are comparing experiences and want the ability to control when and how heat is delivered. They need to understand how the energy is being used and to feel confident in the associated costs. This shift towards experience-led evaluation is beginning to reshape how electric heating is viewed. Installer Paul Campbell from Greenvision
Energy experiences this change in attitude first hand when he is working with customers transitioning from older systems to modern solutions such as Quantum: “One thing that really impresses customers is the high heat retention capabilities. The old storage heaters leak and lose charge, whereas with Dimplex Quantum, because it is so well insulated and so good at retaining that heat, the customer is in control of when they want that heat to be released. “So, on a weekend when people typically go out, with their old storage heaters, they’re just losing and wasting money, but with Quantum, they can actually turn that down to a lower temperature so it’s keeping a bit of background heat, and then when they come back they can turn it up to whatever temperature they want.” What sits behind this is a fundamental shift in how storage heating operates. Rather than charging overnight and releasing heat throughout the day, modern HHRSHs are designed to hold that energy until it is needed. This allows for a level of flexibility that was not previously possible, enabling users to match their desired heat output with occupancy and lifestyle.
28 | electrical wholesalerMay 2026
ewnews.co.uk
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