What an electric heater actually costs to run in Ireland

Quick answer: At Ireland’s domestic day rate of about €0.38/kWh, the heaters we track cost between €0.25 and €0.95 per hour at full power — €37.05 to €142.50 a month if you run one for 5 hours a day. On a smart-meter night rate of about €0.18/kWh the same run costs roughly half. These are ceilings: a thermostat switches the element off once the room is up to temperature, so few heaters draw their rated wattage for a full hour and a real bill lands below them.

Almost every heater page online tells you which one to buy and none of them tell you what it costs to keep switched on. This page is the other half: every heater we track, its rated power, and what that works out to per hour and per month at Irish electricity prices — with the arithmetic shown so you can redo it with your own unit rate.

Running cost of every heater we track

Tariff source: €0.38/kWh day rate and €0.18/kWh night rate, cross-checked against SEAI energy price statistics and published supplier standard rates, July 2026. Rated power and heater type are the manufacturers’ own published figures.

How these numbers are worked out

The whole calculation is three numbers and one multiplication, and we would rather you checked it than trusted it.

1. Rated power — the wattage the manufacturer publishes for that exact model. Not a category average, not a guess from a similar unit. 26 of the 26 heaters in our guides publish one; the other 0 are listed separately, with no figure at all.
2. Tariff — €0.38 per kWh for the day rate and €0.18 per kWh for a typical smart-meter night rate, cross-checked against SEAI energy price statistics and published supplier standard rates, July 2026. Your own unit rate is on your bill and may differ; the arithmetic below is easy to redo with it.
3. Cost per hour = rated watts ÷ 1,000 × the unit rate. A 650 W unit is 0.650 kW, so 0.650 × 0.38 = €0.25 an hour.
4. Cost per month = cost per hour × 5 hours × 30 days. 5 hours a day is our assumption, not a measurement — scale it to how you actually run yours.

Three things these numbers are not

They are not your bill. Every figure here is a ceiling: rated draw at full power, multiplied out. Every heater here converts essentially all the electricity it draws into heat, so at full power a 2 kW heater costs the same to run whatever the badge on it says. What separates them is how much of the hour they spend at full power: a heater with a decent thermostat reaches the set temperature and then idles, while a cheap two-setting fan heater with no thermostat runs flat out until you switch it off. That is where the difference in a real bill comes from, not from one heater being more efficient than another. Either way, treat the table as the worst case.

They do not include standing charges or VAT changes. The unit rate is the marginal cost of running the appliance. Your standing charge is there whether the heater is plugged in or not.

Using this table

Free to quote, cite or reproduce with a link back to this page. If you are writing about damp, heating or energy costs in Ireland and want the underlying figures, everything is on this page — the rated wattages, the tariff, and the arithmetic — so the numbers can be checked rather than taken on trust. Spot an error or a wattage we have wrong? Tell us and we will correct it.

The guides these heaters come from