Thoughts on portable electric heaters
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Temps in the single digits by the end of the week. Time to bust out the portable heaters.
Every house has a room or two that needs a little supplemental heat. Big windows, outside walls, distance from furnace, etc. Portable heaters work great to even up temps but you need to pay attention.
Nearly all portable heaters offer a 1500 watt setting that provides 5120 BTUH of heat. None offer more than that no matter what the ads say, some offer less. Many are adjustable but 5120 BTUH is all you’re going to get when set to high. 1500 watts is all you can draw from a household receptacle.
Even 1500 watts can be problematic. It’s right on the edge of the capacity of a household receptacle, and that’s a receptacle that’s fairly new and perfectly installed. With time things get loose and the connections deteriorate. What worked fine for years may one day get hot - sometimes even start a fire. It happens more often than you’d expect and I’ve seen it more than once.
Vigilance, then. No need to get crazy, but feeling the cord/plug connection for signs of heating from time to time is a good practice. If it’s warm, figure out why and fix it. It doesn’t hurt to lay your hand on other receptacles on the same circuit to see if they’re getting warm as well. There are related connections in those boxes too. Same for the associated circuit breaker - if it’s warm, it’s failing.
Best practice is not to run them at 1500 watts at all. Most are adjustable - 500w, 750w, 1500w is typical. Low, medium, high. 1, 2, or 3. Running them at the lower settings eliminates most problems and is much safer. They’ll run longer cycles but will probably heat the room just fine and won’t put as much stress on the connections. I set the one in my basement to 500 watts and after a few hours to stabilize the room temp it works perfectly.
Note to Daniel: This especially important in manufactured homes. They’re wired differently than stick built homes and the receptacles are not as robust. A lot if them (60’s/70’s) are wired in aluminum which is especially problematic.
Keep warm out there!
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Good stuff, @steve-miller !
We only use space heaters occasionally. Our house has some drafty areas but I think both Mr wtg and I are probably used to living with that.
We adjust the registers in various rooms when we do a switch between heating and cooling. Seems to help with the evenness of temps across all the rooms and between the first two floors; basement is pretty much steady state summer and winter, and we don't use it as living space, just a laundry room.
And in the winter, we tilt the blinds on our south-facing living room windows, especially on sunny days. The thermostat is in that room and if the sun warms up the space the furnace doesn't go on and the rest of the house becomes a refrigerator.
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I just bought an electric oil-filled slimline freestanding panel heater.
We already have a 400W Dimplex that is 20 years old, in the 2nd bedroom for guests. The new one is an 800w Amos brand, in the sitting room as we had to halve our central heating radiator to accommodate new double doors. £75. -
IIRC, your house would be wired at 220V with 16 amp receptacle circuits. An 800 watt heater will draw only 3.5 amps at 220V - well within safe operating limits.
In the US that same heater would draw around 7A on a 15A receptacle. Still OK - it’s when you use the 1500 watt setting you start inviting trouble.
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Thanks Steve. Somehow we have accumulated space heaters over the years. We have three. Two are the upright column type, one is oil-filled. We only use the newest one, in our cold kitchen.
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I like those too. They’re silent and the safest as far as setting nearby things on fire.
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No. Very light.
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My spouse likes it cool... Thermostat is set at 60, but our living room not infrequently gets into the upper 50s. I want to knit sweaters for our birds. One gets used to it. I do wear fleeces - have a flotilla of them from lightly warm to the point where a couple of them are as warm as a medium weight coat. Winter is easy.
What's challenging are the summer months when my spouse wants to think of our home as a very large refrigerator.
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I like our oil-filled heater but it just doesn’t get hot enough.
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They are good for small areas. I kept my insulated tack room above freezing in the barn in Maine. We have one near the desk at the gallery (plus several others that blow air) since the rooms in the lower level of our building have no heat. I like that they don’t make noise, and are so much safer than the ones that get red hot. They are easy to move around too. Just don’t get a cheap one. Our cheap one from Walmart quit working after the first winter.
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Addendum: I did bring out the oil-filled heater today for the room with the TV. It’s working well and the heat is so comfortable even on the low setting. It didn’t have much effect in the kitchen, which is draftier.
It’s possible that the radiator isn’t getting hot enough because of air in the system. I should try bleeding it.
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We have a woodburning fireplace that is original to the house. We had gas logs and a nice set of doors installed probably 20 years ago but we basically never used it. It sucks all the warm air from the house up the chimney. The hearth is floor level and we prefer something that has a raised hearth. And we did re-work the bookcases and the tile around the fireplace, but we weren't really happy with the way it all looked after the remodel but we just ignored it. We also finally realized that the mortar between the fire bricks is gone in lots of places, so a fire in the chimney is a real risk, so we stopped using it altogether. It was sort of a dead-feeling area in the living room.
Anyway...
Costco has freestanding electric fireplaces and we finally found one that we liked and ordered it. It fits perfectly in front of the fireplace and in between the bookcases that flank it. We either have to cut down or build a custom mantel, as the one that comes with it is too wide to fit the available space. But that's not a big deal.
It doesn't have the mantel on it right now but you can get an idea of how it looks. Because it fills the entire space and sits up higher, it totally changes how the room looks and feels.
It has LED flames and you can even turn on the embers. Bunch of colors and you can adjust the intensity. It's amazing how cozy the space feels.
So here's my question for this thread....the unit also has a space heater. We only plan to use it with the LED "fire" which doesn't draw much current at all. The unit is rated at 1500W. Most portable units have two or three heat settings plus a thermostat to turn off the heater when the room reaches the desired temp, as @steve-miller explained.
This unit only has a thermostat with a temperature setting. Lowest setting is 71 and it goes up from there. There doesn't seem to be a way to select hi/med/lo. I'm kind of assuming that it's always running at 1500W and it only goes on/off based on what the thermostat is set for. Does that seem reasonable? I turned it on briefly to be sure that it does actually work, but turned it off before the thermostat kicked in and did it for me.
Here are the specs for the insert. When I turned it on I could see the quartz elements at the top of the firebox insert, and a fan went on.
https://www.realflame.com/landscape-vividflame-electric-firebox
@steve-miller - BTW, the instructions with fireplace insert simply say you need a 15A circuit. It even says it's preferable to have a dedicated circuit, but not a requirement. That surprised me, as I'm on the same page you are with respect to space heaters.
And of course they say if your breakers pop, well then you need to do something. We have the Ting gizmo, so it might catch a potential problem.
As I said, we don't plan to use it as a space heater, so this is mostly an academic exercise. If I did want to use it for heat, I would get our electrician in and have the circuit that this thing is on separated out and create a new 20A circuit so it could be used without having to be concerned about it.
