* electric thermal storage

Thanks to Hydro Ottawa, we installed ten of these units in several social housing complexes to see how they work. The black electric coils use cheaper power available at night to store heat in the red ceramic bricks, which are insulated with the white foam that falls off spacecraft (it's true!). When heat is needed during the day, a small fan blows it out. During the winter, the heater also radiates heat out like a regular hot water radiator. They help to reduce the winter peak and thus the use of coal-fired generating plants.
We learned that the heaters are relatively easy to install, reliable, and provide more comfortable heat than electric baseboards but their capital cost and size makes them best suited to larger rooms than one tends to find in social housing. Average savings are projected to be between 10% and 30%, depending on the demand for heat and living patterns. The timers used for the heaters can also control electric hot water heaters, an additional bonus.

It will make no sense to install these heaters until Time-of-Use rates are introduced in Ontario with Smart Meters, sometime before 2010. The only exception would be for large companies or organizations that already pay Time-of-Use rates because their load demand exceeds 50 kW. That's the case for a social housing organization in Peterborough, which has already installed over 100 units because it pays for the electric heat in those units.