I’ve got several electric heaters in my house - that’s all the heating I have. Which is fine, I find it stops me warming rooms I’m not using. However, the uniform reaction seems to be “OOOhhhhh, electric heaters, they’re soooo inefficient”. Can this be true? How can any significant energy be wasted? In most cases, energy waste is heat, so that can’t be a problem in a heater? (Of course, the inefficiencies of using such heaters sporadically rather than gradually drip-feeding warmth is a different matter, and it’s one I accept.)
An electric heater is nearly 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat. How efficient it is at heating the room depends on its design. OTOH, electric heating is generally more expensive than some other types, like gas, but that’s a different beast than efficiency.
The heater itself is very efficient. It is the whole system that is inefficient. Lets say your electricity is generated by a natural gas turbine. It uses more gas to make electricity to heat your house than heating your house directly from burning natural gas.
OK, so inefficient compared to providing the same heat with gas. I can accept that. But given that I don’t have central heating, and therefore am not consistently heating used and unused rooms alike, am I saving (a) energy and (b) money?
(And no, gas isn’t an option here)
Compared to what?
Compared to gas-powered heating, which is the norm around here, just not for me as I’m not on a gas main.
Tough to call. I suppose the easiest way to find out is find someone with a similarly-sized home with central gas heat and compare their average electric + gas bill with your electric bill. I’m not familiar enough with your area of the world to know what the relative costs of gas and electricity are. Plus, it depends on the wattages of the heaters, how big the rooms are, the insulation factor of the building and how warm you keep it. That said, if you’re just basically spot-heating only those areas you’re in, and shutting off the heaters when you leave the room, you’re probably doing slightly better than someone with central gas-fired heat who keeps the entire house warm.
I feel your pain, O My Brother. My house is between two gas mains. Since I’m in a ‘holiday community’, there aren’t enough year-round residents for the gas company to join the two mains. The join would run right in front of my house!
I have a propane heater in the living room. Propane is about a buck-and-a-half per gallon. Natural (piped-in) gas is just over half that. Ihave a small ceramic heater in the toilet, and I use that in the mornings to heat up the smallest room in the house. The doors to the largest and smallest bedrooms are kept closed, because I don’t use them. I bought an oil-filled radiator-type heater for my bedroom. It has three settings: 700w, 800w, and 1,500w. I’ve use it to take the chill out of the room before I go to bed, but I really don’t need to. I could have used it last Winter though. This year we’re going to have a mild El Niño that will keep the temperatures relatively mild.
One thing about electricity vs. propane: I’m not going to run out of electricity. 
With central heat/air (gas or electric) you can shut off rooms that are not used by closing the air registers.
A few years back we were looking at homes for sale. All homes had copies of several months previous utility bills for comparison. We immediately noticed that homes with heat pumps had much lower electric bills than homes with standard electric furnaces. I would think a plain electric heater would be more efficient than an electric furnace but not a heat pump.
Of course gas heating is even less… really is for us, we have free gas from a gas well on the neighbors property.
There’s more to consider than just “thermodynamic efficiency.” My uncle has baseboard electric heat in every room and loves it. Why?
- Zone control is easy.
- Very clean.
- No ductwork.
- No periodic maintenance and no filters to replace.
- No ugly & space-consuming tank to look at.
- Here’s the biggie: furnaces have to be periodically replaced at great expense. If a baseboard unit goes bad (which is rare), it’s cheap to replace.
- No worries about carbon monoxide poisoning.
Electric heat is also much better for the environment than gas or oil heat.
Not necessarily. Most power plants are coal or oil burning. The energy to run those electric heaters comes mainly from burning one of these fuels. What you end up doing is reducing non-point source emissions, but increasing localized point source pollution. Generally, this is still considered an improvement, however, since it’s much easier to treat one single source of pollutants than trying to control many.
Nuclear power has its own environmental issues.
- Agree.
- Why are they cleaner than an electric furnace?
- A furnaces requires no maintenance, it does take a couple minutes to change filters every season.
- Tank? What tank?
- We used a gas furnace for 29 years, it was still working with never a problem when we moved. This discussing was about electric and I would think an electric furnace would last even longer. The heat pump I’m sure doesn’t have the life of plain strip heaters used in electric furnaces.
- CO poisoning from a electric furnace?.. no way.
There is a very slight possible with the older type gas furnace but the ones made in the last ten years are almost 100% failsafe. With a CO detector alarm makes them 100% safe.
I would think baseboard electric heat would be fine but costly to operate when compared to something like a heat pump but I’ve never actually owned either.