Words cannot describe how good it feels to wrap yourself into one of these when you’re cold.
I heat my house with just a heatpump but it can’t quite keep up when it gets well below 10 degrees celcius and I’m too cheap to turn on electric radiators. I bought an electric blanket for 22 euros and I just heat that instead. Even just sitting on it makes a huge difference.
Generally speaking, when using resistive heat, it’s best to use them as little as possible. Direct application to your body (electric blanket) is cheaper than heating the air (heat strips in hvac air handler).
Some people think that using one of those oil based electric radiators is cheaper than a heat pump but it’s not.
All resistive electric heaters have the same efficiency, regardless of their shape, methodology, or what the manufacturer prints on the box. That efficiency is 100%, i.e. all of the electricity put into them gets turned into heat, one way or the other. The same amount of electricity (up to and including the locally specified legal maximum for a standalone appliance, which in the US is 1500 watts or roughly 12.5 amps) becomes the same amount of heat. It doesn’t matter if the manufacturer put “for large rooms” or “for small rooms” on the box, or what. 1500 watts is 1500 watts.
However in ideal conditions and specifically for the purposes of heating, a heat pump can achieve efficiency of over 100%. Which sounds impossible, but only until you realize that a heat pump’s method of operation is not to create heat but rather to move heat that’s already there from the outdoors to inside.
Great info, but want to add that heat pump efficency is normally around 300%, which is why they are so cost effective. 1500w in a heat pump is around the same as 4500w resistive.
Oil-filled radiators, despite being electric heaters, do cost less to run than regular space heaters or electric baseboard heaters if all other things remain equal. This is because the oil they’re filled with acts as a much more effective thermal mass than the air in the room. It takes about the same amount of energy to heat the room to your desired temp, but then the heater can switch off for longer while the oil continues to radiate stored heat into the air.
That’s not true. That thermal mass takes energy to heat too. Whatever “excess” heat stored in the oil was put there when you turned the radiator on.
For an oil-filled radiator to be cheaper to run than a regular electric one, it’d somehow need to be over 100% efficient - which it isn’t. They’re both resistive heaters that convert 100% of the electricity into heat.
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