Yeah, I know - it’s freakin’ hot out there, and here I am starting a thread about space heaters. But sometime in the next few weeks, we’re going to be getting the info from the propane company telling us how much it is going to cost us to heat the house this winter, and folks, I’m very, very nervous about it. It was already expensive last winter, and with prices they way they are now, I expect this winter to really be a hardship. So I’m thinking of alternative ways to stay warm.
We have a progammable thermostat, so it seems to me that we could turn the house heat down quite a bit at night while we’re asleep and use a space heater to keep the bedroom comfortable. I want something that is going to be quiet, and safe since we’ve got two large dogs and I don’t want anyone getting burned.
We have two at my house. They’re excellent. One has a timer, one doesn’t, and I would suggest you get the timer if you’re only using it at night. The room it is in has gone from being the coldest room in the house to the warmest room in the house. Also, they make a really cool gurgling noise when they first start heating up.
My house is heated by propane, which is expensive. So I bought an oil-filled radiator-style heater. It works well in my bedroom, though I don’t use it except on the coldest nights since I bought an electric blanket.
I have a small ceramic heater with a fan for warming up the bathroom.
I contacted a member of the city councel (or steering committee, or something like that – volunteers) about improving the infrastructure here. There’s a gas main just down the hill from me, and another one a couple of blocks in the other direction. I contacted the gas company last year, and they said that they’d like to join them someday. The join would go down under my street. But half the people up here only live here in the summer, and the gas company said they received zero replies to a survey they tried a few years ago. Funny, the neighbours I’ve talked to want piped-in gas. More and more people are living here year-round. By 2010 there may be almost 10,000 people in the area. It’s time for us to join the 20th Century and have piped-in gas.
The electric oil-filled heaters do a good job of warming a room. It takes a while (at least a day) for them to heat up and stabilize and uniformly heat the room. They work best if they are left on all the time, although you can adjust the temperature down to the minimum when you won’t be using the room. It takes time for the oil to heat, so there’s always a time lag. If you want more heat during sleep time, crank the heater up a couple of hours ahead of time.
They are not cheap to run, although using one to warm up a single room – as opposed to using central heat to warm up the whole house – may provide some savings.
I use one to keep my laundry room and computer room warm enough that the pipes don’t freeze. This is a large unheated very poorly insulated space, probably equivalent to three bedrooms. In the worst of last year’s winter, when temperatures were down in the teens, the space heater added about $100 a month to my electric bill.
Thanks for this - we plan to use the space heater to just tweak the room temp about 5 degrees, so it sounds like if we turn it on a few hours ahead of time, it will do the job we want without costing too much. Our living room is very inefficient to heat, because it has a cathedral ceiling (all that unused space!), so I’m hoping that turning down the central heat at night and using the space heater in the bedroom (which has a normal ceiling and is thus much easier to keep warm) will save on the propane costs. It also helps that there are 4 mammals in the bedroom at night - all that hot breath makes the room noticeably warmer in the morning :).
I had one. I don’t know about the cost though because all of my utilities + rent were paid for at a flat rate. I could see how it could be expensive though. But really, I don’t see how people said it took an entire day for it to heat up a room. I had a bedroom that was normal sized, I guess, and it wasn’t bad. It took about 30 minutes before it was sweltering hot.
Remember that your central a/c system is perhaps 80% efficient, but any (non-heatpump) electric heater is 100% efficient, but the powerplant is only perhaps 50% eff., so you are fighting a up hill battle here.
Yes you can save a bit by using it to heat a single room, but over all you are getting less heat per $.
You can get a space LP gas heater which would be much more eff., or use a kero heater.
If you are really looking to save $, I would suggest a radiant electric heater only for rooms which youy spend a very short time in (bathroom), and only the type that glows ‘red hot’