Are Portable Heaters Energy Efficient?
There’s a mixed bag of opinions on the energy efficiency one can expect from portable heaters. When it comes to saving money with portable heating, the lack of a clear and definitive comment on the subject isn’t due to a lack of research but due to variables in every home and intended use. I could tell you today that a particular portable heater is energy efficient only to have you come back in a couple months to tell me how horribly wrong I was. The fact is that many modern portable heaters are energy efficient, providing you apply some critical thinking to their use.
To get the most bang for your buck, start with the one element which will sabotage even the most efficient portable heater by thinking about insulation. Efforts here will save you money down the road regardless the heating solution you adopt. Failing to properly insulate your home or the room in which you will be using your heater is like opening a window and tossing some money into the wind every day.
Next, get the right tool for the job. If you want instant heat cascading throughout the room a few minutes after you turn on your portable heater then you need a model with a fan to quickly move that hot air throughout the room. Realize right away that there’s a substantial drop off in savings by going for this option. Yes, your room will warm up more quickly but you’ll have to keep the portable heater on all day regardless and with a model that moves air, you’re operating both a heating element and a fan. More juice required equates to less money saved. For your real savings, opt for a passive portable heater.
Passive portable heating models which radiate heat take longer to heat a room but offer the benefits of quiet operation and notable savings in heating costs due to the lack of an additional electric component to power. No fan. It’s important to understand what you’re getting here. You’ll want to turn the unit on thirty minutes or so in advance of expecting a cozy room. Options in this regard include radiant heat panels and oil heat. The latter look like common apartment radiators but are wheel-mounted and completely self-contained.
Sticking with the right-tool-for-the-right-job motto, also ensure your heater is adequate for the space you want to heat. A heater designed for a 10 X 10 room isn’t going to be adequate for a 16 X 20 room with open doors. Read the specs before you buy and get what you need. Buying less isn’t going to save you more. You’re better off purchasing a heater designed for the space you are trying to heat and running it on lower power once the room is comfortable rather than buying two units which aren’t adequate for your space and running both on full power.
Ultimately, your greatest savings in cost come from using your portable heater to warm the room you occupy and keeping your main central or gas heating unit turned down dramatically. In my own home, my wife and I often occupy separate floors of the house, her in her craft room, me in my office. We each have small, portable heaters for our separate rooms. As the rooms are fairly small, the heaters do a fine job on low settings. The remainder of the house is left comparatively cool giving our central heating and our checking account a nice break.
By being sensible, using the right tool for the job, keeping our main heating unit set low and ensuring we have adequate insulation throughout our home, we realize savings in the range of several hundred dollars a year since adopting our own portable heating solution and you can too. Just ensure your portable heater is adequate for the job and use it where it will have the most effect.
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3 Responses to “Are Portable Heaters Energy Efficient?”
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In my experience electric portable heaters are all pretty much the same efficiency. They are all 100% efficient at converting electricity into heat because of the resistance based heating element they use. You are right that the fan does have an impact on overall efficiency because the fan takes energy. But unless the fan in your heater is a hurricane fan it is such a small percentage of the total energy that it really isn’t going to have an effect.
Because all electric heaters are close to 100% efficient at converting electricity into heat, it’s important to look at the effectiveness of the heater for the heating task at hand. Are you trying to cool an entire room or just the person sitting in an armchair reading a book? If it’s the whole room, a heater with a fan will do a good job of distributing the air around the room. If the only thing that needs to be heated is the shivering person on the couch, a radiant heater aimed at the armchair will do a great job of warming up the person in the armchair without wasting energy warming parts of the room no one is in.
Another thing to bear in mind is that if your electricity is generated from fossil fuels, only about 35% of the heat from the fossil fuel even gets to your home. When you heat with natural gas, 100% of the gas gets to your home and between 80% (for a mid-efficiency natural gas furnace) and 96% (for an ultra-high-efficiency gas furnace) gets converted into heat in your home. So if you have a choice between electric heat generated from coal in one third of your house, and ultra-high-efficiency heat in your entire house, you can choose the later without consuming more fossil fuels, and you’ll be more comfortable.
Another factor to consider is electric storage heaters. If you are on time-of-day metering, you can save a ton by capturing heat in electric storage heaters during times of low electricity cost, and use that heat later to heat your rooms as needed.
Unless you pay very low, perhaps artificially subsidized, rates for electricity, or your choice is between heating a 3,000 square foot house and heating just one or two rooms of 200 square feet each, you may find the electric space heater can be quite an expensive option.
For more of my own thoughts on this topic see Energy efficient electric heaters.
Robin - An excellent comment and thanks. I’ve added “efficient” to my dirty words library because I’ve discovered it is a lot like “statistics,” - open to interpretation.
You are absolutely right that any portable heater efficiently converts electricity into heat. Problems begin to crop up when we consider how well (or not) that heat is distributed through a room. Or if it even needs to be distributed to the entire room (as you wisely pointed out) or just to an individual.
In addition to that, we can further muddy the waters by asking how long we’re drawing on those precious fossil fuels to get the room to a comfortable temperature. Is the unit on a timer? Is it “smart” technology?
For those reasons as well as the excellent points you’ve made, I can only remind consumers to be smart about their purchases. Energy consciousness is about more than just the money you save in utility bills, it’s about the planet you save in the process.
Dave
[...] noted in our previous post on energy efficiency and portable heaters, passive heaters (those without built in fans) can be your most energy efficient options. Did you [...]