Nothing on the walls. Heat only the rooms you use. Slim white PowerBoard panels on the ceiling warm people and everything in the room directly, instead of heating the air first. Supplied and installed across the UK.
For a typical UK 3-bedroom home, PowerBoard infrared runs at £562–£1,263 per year (~£47–£105/mo) in real-world zoned use - only heating the rooms you're actually in, with panels cycling instead of running flat-out like a radiator. Pair it with solar PV + battery storage and that drops to £57–£758 per year (~£5–£63/mo). Gas runs £800-£1,400, oil £1,200-£2,000, LPG £1,500-£2,500. Costs vary based on insulation, panel sizing, and energy tariff.
Oil & LPG homeowners save most. Fuel costs 40-60% higher than gas means the running cost saving from switching is larger for rural properties.
Pair with solar PV + battery. Infrared panels respond instantly, so a solar PV + battery setup can cover most heating demand directly. Diverter-only setups can't power panels in the evening - battery storage does.
How these figures are calculated: All PowerBoard figures above come from the same formula used by the calculator below - UK 3-bedroom home at 27p/kWh. We keep this rate fixed, set just above Ofgem's price cap when we chose it (26.32p, October 2026). The "all rooms, full demand" line is a like-for-like worst case where every panel runs as if it were a radiator covering the whole property. "Typical zoned use" applies a 55% real-world utilisation factor to reflect how PowerBoard is actually used: only the rooms in active use are heated and panels cycle once at temperature. The "with solar" line assumes a 4kW solar PV system with battery storage. Run the calculator with your own home's details for a personalised figure.
Annual running cost estimates for typical Birmingham properties, based on the comparison-table benchmarks above.
Gas / electric figures are UK 3-bed mid-points scaled by property size. PowerBoard figures come from the calculator's own formula: about 5 heating hours a day at 27p/kWh, with panels actually drawing power only ~38% of that time (thermostats cycle panels off once a room is at temperature, and only the rooms in active use are heated), scaled to Birmingham's 7.5-month heating season. The "with solar" column also assumes a 4kW solar PV system with battery storage. Use the calculator above for a personalised figure.
Full UK cost breakdown
Customise every input
Hero, quote and FAQs
4-step process & pricing
Climate, housing stock and energy mix all shift the headline figure. Here's how Birmingham compares.
Birmingham sits on a low West Midlands plateau roughly 140m above sea level - high enough that the city centre regularly records the first frost of any major English city in late October, and the airport often sits a degree below the city. January lows of 1–2°C combined with persistent damp drifting up from the Tame and Rea valleys mean the heating effectively runs from late September through April in the older suburbs.
Birmingham has the largest council-housing portfolio in Europe outside Moscow - around 60,000 homes managed directly by the City Council, plus a vast private-rented sector. The dominant property types are interwar semis in Acocks Green and Hall Green, back-to-back terraces in Sparkhill, post-war low-rise estates in Druids Heath and a growing crop of city-centre flats in the Jewellery Quarter. Many of those flats were originally built without gas, leaving residents on direct-acting electric panels that infrared replaces straight onto the same circuits.
Most B-postcode homes are on mains gas, but Birmingham's social-housing tower blocks and the Jewellery Quarter conversions disproportionately rely on electric heating - and these are exactly the homes where running costs have spiked hardest under the latest price cap. The City Council's Net Zero Roadmap targets a fully decarbonised housing stock by 2040 and is part-funding electric retrofits where gas isn't viable.
Professional installation across all major cities