Lasko space heaters

Head of the pack for comfort, value and safety

Lasko space heaters are among the best value on the market, in terms of price, quality, and features. It’s no wonder I sell more of these space heaters than the next 8 brands combined.

Lasko Products is a Philadelphia-based company with over 100 years of experience making and selling home comfort products such as Lasko space heaters, fans, and humidifiers. Lasko heaters run the gamut from an $18 personal space heater designed to keep your feet warm underneath a desk with a meager 200 watts of heat, to $120 space heaters with 1,500 watts of heating power.

1,500 watts is actually not that much – about the output of a blow dryer on high, enough to boost the temperature in a large room on a cool day, or keep a small unheated room warm in winter – but it’s just about the limit for a portable space heater, because a typical breaker on your electric panel is 15 amps, and at 120 volts, that means the maximum wattage is 1,800 watts. For a more powerful electric heater you need to go for a 220 volt baseboard heater with its own dedicated circuit.

Energy efficiency of Lasko space heaters

One of the most common questions of visitors to my site is how efficient particular electric heaters are. As I explain in my main heater article, Energy efficient electric heaters, all electric heaters have exactly the same efficiency, namely, they convert 100% of the electric energy they consume, into heat output. Even the energy used to power the fan in a fan heater eventually converts to heat, because of the law of entropy. Heat sources that involve combustion, such as oil furnaces or boilers, gas furnaces, or fire places, are less than 100% efficient because the exhaust gases must be removed from the space being heated, and some of the heat escapes with the exhaust gases. But electric heaters have no exhaust gases, so nowhere else for the energy to go than into the space being heated. The only way to get more heat for your energy investment than 100% efficient electric heat is to go for a heat pump, which uses electricity to transfer heat from the outdoors into your home. Heat pumps can achieve coefficients of performance (units of heat generated per unit of energy invested) of up to 4.5, which is (almost, but not quite) equivalent to 450% efficient!

So on that question of “Is this electric heater efficient”, the first thing to note is that anyone trying to sell you heaters on the basis of high energy efficiency, be they Lasko space heaters or any other brand, is taking you for a ride. Every electric heater is 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat.

Popularity of Lasko heaters

I did a quick survey of the space heaters my website visitors have bought in the last three years. Out of 354 space heaters my visitars have purchased (through Amazon) since 2009, over 150 of them were Lasko space heaters – over 40% of the total. The next most popular brand was Optimus, at half the Lasko sales, and all the remaining brands combined were less than the Lasko space heater sales. Here’s a snapshot of sales of the various brands. In 2023, Optimus is nowhere to be found in the list of units sold; instead, DeLonghi and Dr Heater are the runners up to Lasko. The data below is from 2009

Lasko space heaters also get an above average score in product reviews, with the exception of one or two lemons in their catalog. In particular, the Lasko Silent 1500 Watt Natural Convection Baseboard Heater is one to avoid; while it seems to work beautifully for most people when they first set it up, the heating element often fails within the first few months, or fails to come on after the heater is brought back out of storage in the autumn. If you read the product reviews for Lasko space heaters on Amazon, you will quickly discover that most of the low ratings (other than for the baseboard unit mentioned above) are because the heater didn’t provide enough heat, but since Lasko space heaters are exactly as efficient as all other electric space heaters, this is clearly the result of people having unrealistic expectations, for example trying to heat a whole apartment in a cold city with a single 1500 watt heater.

Four great Lasko heaters

There are literally dozens of Lasko space heaters to choose from. Amazon.com alone offers over 80 Lasko heaters. (For my fellow Canadian shoppers, Amazon.ca offers 32 Lasko heaters.) In the interests of space (and your and my time) I won’t review them all here; instead I’ll cover the four most popular Lasko space heaters, with a brief overview of the features of each.

Oscillating tower heaters: Lasko makes a wide range of oscillating tower heaters, which are tall heaters that rotate on a vertical access to distrbute heat across a room. The Lasko Oscillating Electric Tower Space Heater shown has an adjustable thermostat and remote control. You can also connect it to your own universal remote control, if you like to control everything! It has a temperature display and you can adjust the temperature up or down, a degree at a time. On the High setting it will turn on or off baesd on whether the room temperature falls below or up to the temperature setting. One downside is that this feature doesn’t work on the Low setting, so if you’re in a small room that heats quickly, you can either use the low setting and manually turn the heater off when it gets warm enough (and back on when you get the chills), or you can go with the high heating mode, which means more short blasts of intense heat.

Personal Lasko space heater: One of the top selling of the Lasko space heaters is the Lasko MyHeat Personal Mini Space Heater. This is a very modest heater in terms of both price and power output. Most other plug-in space heaters have two modes and operate at 750 and 1500 watts, or 900 and 1500 watts. This one operates at just 200 watts. That makes it ideal for warming up the air on your desk and blowing it at you, or warming up the space under your desk so your toes stay warm. But do not expect it to warm a whole room, unless your room is a closet. Since this unit is meant to be placed on a desk or table, you get your pick of colors – white, black, blue or purple. It’s a mere 6″ tall and 4×4″ wide – small enough to throw in a suitcase if you’re heading on a trip and find the AC in hotel rooms too cold! Another benefit of a 200 watt heater is that you can use it to heat a car, provided you have a 12V DC to 120V AC converter, because it draws a small enough current – 200 watts – for a car electrical system to handle the load.

Bathroom space heater: Lasko makes a wide range of ceramic heaters. Ceramic heaters place more reliance on natural convection as a means of distributing the heat from the heater, whereas heaters that only use an electric coil resistance element typically have a stronger fan (some ceramic heaters have no fan at all). This makes ceramic heaters typically quieter, but it does mean it can take a few extra minutes to start feeling the full force of the heat. The Lasko Small Portable Ceramic Space Heater for Bathroom and Indoor Home Use is one ceramic space heater that is specifically designed to be safely used in a bathroom, so you can step out of the shower and not have to be shocked by the cold winter air in the bathroom (or shocked by the heater!). It has a 1500 watt heater so in spite of its small size (8″ tall by 6″ wide by 6″ deep) it can throw off enough heat to quickly warm up your cold bathroom. This is a very basic heater in terms of functions: It has a 1-hour mode, which runs the heater just for 1 hour on high; and a high and low setting. Sorry, no remote, but who wants to hold a remote from the bathtub?

How tall is a tower supposed to be? The Lasko 2-speed 16-inch oscillating ceramic heater is officially (per its name) a tower heater, but it doesn’t even come up to most people’s knees! It’s short enough for table top but tall enough for a floor heater. (Most other tower heaters are in the 24-30 inch height range.) This heater lacks some of the fancy features of the more expensive Lasko space heaters, with only high and low settings, no direct temperature control; it also lacks a remote controller. One nice thing about this space heater is it has a fan-only mode, so you can use it to keep cool in summer, although the air flow is pretty modest compared to a fan built specifically for cooling. On the other hand, the fan settings for heating are: High fan for high heating mode, and low fan for low heating mode. The fan is quiet in both modes, but having a low fan in the low heating mode means it doesn’t really throw the warm air around as effectively as it might.

Overall, we’re talking quality and comfort at bargain prices

There are four things that impress me about Lasko space heaters relative to the other popular brands:

• Lasko space heaters offer the widest selection of any brand of heater sold in North America
• Overall these appear to be very reliable heaters, and many come with three year warranties, which is an indication of the faith Lasko itself has in its products
• Consumers are generally pleased with the effectiveness with which Lasko space heaters provide heat to indoor spaces. Note that when you read a customer review complaining that the heater wasn’t up to the job, it’s usually because they had unrealistic expectations about the amount of heat required to heat a given space.
• Lasko heaters are very competitively priced, both online and in retail stores.

I feel I can recommend these heaters to my readers without reservation. Although electric heating of a given space tends to use more energy overall than heating with natural gas, you can obtain significant cost savings by strategically placing electric heaters in different rooms of your home, so that you heat only the rooms you are currently using. Using Lasko space heaters to spot heat bedrooms at night, or the kitchen or living room during family time, or a home office or den during work hours, is a great way to cut your overall heating costs.