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.
Great story! 
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!
We got a good bit of snow last night. Luckily a trio of football lads showed up on my porch this morning, shovels in hand, and offered to clear my walk and drive for $15.
I had em clear the snow off of my truck as well and gave them $30. Happy to do it and I hope they show up after every storm.
How about Usha?
There are other considerations in the case study presented.
The window units are being installed to replace what is undoubtably an ancient hydronic system with radiators. Upside is that the tenants will all get A/C that the hydronic (steam/hot water) system didn’t provide. The managing authority will no longer have to operate/maintain the hydronic equipment - equipment that is likely due for replacement. The heat pumps offer much better temp control than the radiators did and the residents may not require as much heat to be comfortable. The heat pumps are modular - fixing or replacing one does not require shutting down the entire building.
But there are also downsides. Most public housing will not have electric capacity sufficient to run that many window units, necessitating considerable electrical work and probably a new feed from the utility. Older single family homes will be the same and most new ones will as well.
The central system was operated and energy was paid for by the managing authority. These new units are being fed from existing electric feeds to each unit, and if these feeds are individually metered the energy bills will become the responsibility of each tenant. This is both good and bad - paying your own power bills will encourage you to conserve, but miss a few payments and your power gets shut off. Will rents be lowered to reflect this shift in responsibility? We shall see.
The other problem with heat pumps is that although they will run down to -20F they don’t make sense to run at temps lower that about 20F. At the lower temps most units shut down the heat pump and fire up electric resistance heat strips. This is the least efficient form of heating out there, which means power consumption jumps considerably. These new low temp units may run acceptably when it’s colder than 20F but at some point they’re going to be providing resistance heat. Not a huge problem in CA, but IT IS a problem in areas where you really need heat - like NYC.
Finally, these units are installed in a public housing building. They’re modular - removable -and people are going to steal them. They might steal them and resell them or simply to strip the copper out of them and sell it for scrap. It happens with electric wiring and copper plumbing pipes already.
So - maybe. I hope they’ll publish a report in a year or two analyzing the effectiveness of the project and how it’s working out.
While a heat pump is more efficient than a gas furnace in absolute terms, it will be more expensive to run than a gas furnace in nearly all markets. In many it will also be more expensive to run than an oil or propane furnace.
The reason they’re being promoted so aggressively is climate change, the theory being that if you run a heat pump on electricity generated by renewable sources you can cut down on CO2 emissions.
In CA that might make sense -a huge percentage of electricity there comes from wind/solar. Ohio not so much - most of what we get comes from coal. Downside in CA is that electricity is very expensive and a heat pump will cost 2X or more to run than a gas furnace.
Happy birthday! 
Wow. Sounds rough.
Hope everything resolves quickly!
This is the first time I’ve heard that story.
Thanks!
Good grief.
Very clever.
I’ll be watching to see how they work out.
If you do a lot of purées in big batches you might like an immersion blender for. Christmas.
Much easier than transferring everything to a blender.
Then a wood stove might be just the thing!
Hope you like splitting firewood. 
40 degrees and raining this morning. Snow is all gone.
Procrastination FTW!
Snow and ice all over around here.
Put the car in the garage and otherwise I’m ignoring it.
I looked at the ingredients list on the bag and as UPF foods go it’s not the worst but the stuffing I used to make is much cleaner. I start by making cornbread and proceed from there.
The very same!
Ya’ll like music, maybe you’d like a documentary on songwriting. Emphasis is country but I daresay the principles are the same.
