Heat just the space right around you, and save energy

It’s a cold day outside – and inside – but my personal space heater is helping me keep toasty warm as I write this page. I sit at a wide desk consisting of a custom-cut sheet of plywood supported on each side by filing cabinets, and I run the heater on the floor against the wall – far enough from my legs not to burn them, but close enough to keep them toasty warm!

Small space heaters are a great investment if you want to stay warm in your house or apartment and you stay in one part of the house for long periods. A personal space heater can keep a small enclosed room warm, or a smaller space within a room if that space is reasonably well enclosed. But be aware that there’s a fixed relationship between the wattage of a personal space heater and the amount of heat it gives off. Don’t be fooled by claims of energy efficiency: the lower the wattage, the lower the heat output. As I explain in my main Energy efficient electric heaters page, all electric heaters are 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat.

For this personal space heater review I am going to stick to lower-wattage heaters – ones that have at least one power setting below 1,000 watts. And I’ll start with the simplest and least expensive heater, one that also has the lowest wattage of any I’ve seen. You probably already have one at home and didn’t even know it: an incandescent lightbulb!

There’s a reason electric utilities are constantly urging their customers to switch from incandescent lights to compact fluorescent or LED house lights: almost all the electricity used by a typical incandescent light bulb is converted directly into heat. So while an incandescent light bulb is quite inefficient at producing light, it’s very efficient at producing heat! The cheapest, lowest-wattage personal space heater you can get is really just an incandescent lightbulb, mounted on a small lamp, tucked under your desk near your feet.

There are a couple of problems with this space heater though, which most heaters designed for use as a personal space heater are designed to avoid. First, it’s easy to kick a lamp over or accidentally step on or kick the lightbulb. Now instead of a personal space heater you have a mess of broken glass. Second, if you don’t surround the light bulb with some kind of guard, you can burn yourself if your leg or foot touches the bulb or gets too close to it. So while a light bulb as a personal space heater is a good option in the short term or if you’re short on cash, it’s not something I recommend for daily use.

Under 250 watts

One personal space heater that puts off just a small amount of heat – enough to keep your feet warm in a tiny enclosed space while the rest of the room is cool – is the Olydon Electric Heated Floor Mat. This heater is just 55 watts, so don’t expect it to throw off a lot of heat, but if you’re sitting at a desk for hours at a time, and you have a cold floor, it will boost the temperature on your feet by a few degrees, and if the space is enclosed (for example a wooden desk with columns of drawers on eithe rside) it may provide some warmth to your legs. 55 watts is hardly any heat at all – it would take 15 to 30 of these heaters to equal the heat output of one blow-dryer – but if you can partly enclose the area, for example by draping a blanket over your lap to shut off some of the opening below the desk – the heat will slowly build up. But if you’re shivering and getting chilblains now, I would go for something higher powered, at least 250-400 watts.

Japanese families have a neat way of keeping their heating costs down, by keeping rooms relatively cold in winter, but heating the space underneath a low wooden table covered by a heavy blanket. Family members and guests sit around the table to do homework, read, or eat a meal, with their legs underneath the blanket, kept warm by the heating source. These heated tables, or kotatsu, are also used (but known by different names) in parts of Central Asia and Spain, and you can easily build your own with the Cozy Legs heater, by mounting the heater on the underside of a table and draping blankets over it. The heater puts off just enough heat to keep the airspace under a small table warm – provided the room itself is at least partially heated. Of course, if the room is at a frigid 20F, this home-made kotatsu won’t do much to keep you warm.

One way of achieving the heat for your own kotatsu is to use a heated carpet such as the Hot Carpet by Woo Warmer. This carpet has a 500 watt heating element spread across its entire 33″ x 72″ surface. Not only would it be great for a kotatsu but it would be nice at the foot of a couch to keep your feet warm.

The Fellowes Climate Control foot rest and personal space heater is probably a better investment, considering it produces 50% more heat, costs about the same, and is a more sturdily built, durable unit. It’s designed to sit below your desk or table (or armchair) and warm your bare or sock-covered feet. The Fellowes foot rest has small surface bumps that help passively massage your feet, and it is angled to ensure good posture as you sit. It will keep your feet and to some extent your legs warm (or cool in summer – it has a fan-only mode) as well as keep your feet comfortable. One of its better safety features is the fact that it shuts off after eight hours, so if you start it up, wander off, and forget it, you won’t be wasting that much energy – at most $0.20 to $0.50 for typical North American electricity rates – and remember that the heat it produces does add to the overall comfort level of your home, even if it’s not keeping your feet warm at the time.

Again, anything you can do to reduce airflow from the space under your table or desk and the main airspace of the room you place this personal space heater in will help keep more of that heat where you want it, around your legs.

This unit will do a modestly good job keeping your feet (and perhaps your legs) warm while costing very little to operate. But it definitely will not keep an entire room warm.

The last personal space heater I’ll cover that is under 250 watts is also the one most people wind up buying – the 200-watt Lasko MyHeat personal ceramic heater.

This personal space heater is not much bigger than a PC speaker, and again doesn’t put out much heat – at 200 watts it’s the same as two high-powered incandescent lightbulbs – but it’s definitely enough to keep your legs warm at a desk if you’re not working inside a walk-in refrigerator! The Lasko MyHeat ceramic heater provides a nice steady stream of warm air flowing against your legs, and as with other small space heaters it draws so little current that there’s no risk you’ll trip a circuit breaker while using it. It’s safe too, with a ceramic heating element that provides overheating protection, and its housing is cool to the touch.

Personal space heaters 600 watts and under

Once you get above 1,000 watts with a space heater, it’s debatable whether it should be called a personal space heater or a room heater, since you can actually keep a small room warm with a 1,000 watt heater, unless the room is very drafty, poorly insulated, or it’s freezing cold outside. There’s only one additional heater that squeezes in under 1,000 for both its settings, so instead I’ll consider personal space heaters where at least the low setting is under 1,000 watts.

The Vornado Personal Vortex space heater is another great product from Vornado, built to last and designed to keep you warm without breaking the bank as far as electricity consumption goes. This unit uses either 375 or 750 watts, and is built with the usual durable Vornado quality, and comes with Vornado’s signature customer service (in the unlikely event you have problems with it). Vornado vortex heaters have a powerful fan that keeps the warm air circulating well, which means this heater can actually heat a small room uniformly (although not necessarily quickly). The heater is great placed at your feet or on your desk, gently blowing warm air your way. It also has a fan-only mode for use in warmer weather. This is one of a handful of small space heaters that provides some warmth while not drawing enough power to trip a typical office circuit breaker, so if you’ve been getting in trouble at work for causing power outages with a larger personal space heater, the Vornado personal vortex heater will get you out of trouble.

In terms of safety the Vornado personal space heater has a couple of good features: a button on the bottom that must be depressed for the heater to stay on – so that if you knock the heater over it shuts off – and the fact that while it throws off a decent amount of heat, you’ll never burn yourself when touching the unit, which keeps relatively cool.

Finally, the Vornado is generally a very quiet personal space heater, to the point where you can actually forget that it’s on. I think this is probably the best personal space heater under 1,000 watts – unless all you want to do is keep your feet warm, I would go with something capable of throwing its heat around a little more than a personal foot warmer.

Another decent personal space heater in the under-1000 watt range is the R.W. Flame oscillating radiant heater. Most heaters simply heat the air near the heater, and then optionally blow that air around so it spreads more evenly. Radiant heaters, on the other hand, emit infrared radiation – in other words, light in the infrared spectrum – and this heat warms solid objects it strikes, but does not warm the air it travels through. (Think if the red light over the cafeteria French fries – that’s radiant heat.) Radiant heat is perfectly safe – and especially in a drafty room it can be great to have a parabolic or other radiant heater shining its infrared light straight at you, so you’re kept warm even if the room is cool.

The R.W. Flame radiating heater warms up quickly and has adequate safety features. It’s ideal if you stay put in one place – whether at a desk or in an armchair. It’s also great if you’re in a large room or in an open-concept house and you don’t want to heat the whole space but you want to stay warm. It’s not ideal for sleeping, because it produces a certain amount of light, which can make it hard to sleep, and bcause if you’re in a bed it’s rather hard to aim the heater so that it shines on your bed and warms your covers. It’s also not great if you move about the house a great deal, since it will only warm you as you walk by it. The only caution is that some people find the light it emits to be too bright. Although it is really only about as bright as a 60 watt light bulb, if you’re trying to sleep or watch television you’ll find it distracting. I’d suggest it for daytime use – provided you’re mostly staying put. It’s easily moved from one spot to another, so if you spend some time working at a desk, then move to an armchair to read, it can still keep you warm in each place. But don’t expect it to keep an entire room warm – you’ll need to use a lot more wattage to accomplish that. This heater has a low setting of 400 watts and a high setting of 800 watts.

Another personal space heater near the low end of the heat output range is the Comfort Zone personal heater with adjustable thermostat, model CZ-45E. This unit has three settings, 500, 750 and 1500 watts, so it’s a bit on the high end for a personal space heater, but it’s the right choice if you want to heat a small room in an otherwise cold apartment or house.

It also has a fan-only setting so you could put it on your desk and keep yourself cool in hot weather while you work. It has three energy settings and is about the size of a toaster, at 8.7″ high by x 5.1″ deep by 7.5″ high. The fan helps improve circulation of the heated air, and it has an overload thermal protector to prevent it from overheating. I can’t offer any more information on this heater – I haven’t seen one myself and details about it are pretty sketchy.

The Sunpentown heater is the only tower heater I’ve found in the personal space heater category. Tower heaters typically provide an oscillating motion that pushes heat around to different parts of a room, which helps them spread heat more effectively. You would place most tower heaters on the floor, but the Sunpentown unit is a small tower heater designed for countertop use so that it can blow its heat directly on your upper body. (You could also put one on the floor under a table to warm your legs.) It comes with an auto-shutoff that helps if you forget to turn it off and leave the room, and a safety shutoff if it is tipped over. It is also cool enough to touch even when operating on high. It can run at 600 watts, 1200 watts, or in fan-only mode, which makes it useful in summer as well as winter. The Sunpentown mini tower heater is also a very well made personal space heater and is one of the quietest available – so quiet you may wonder if it’s even on. It comes with a 1-year warranty and gets very good customer reviews, although you really need to be aware of how small it is. Unlike other tower heaters that can be 32, 40, even 50 inches high, this little heater is just over a foot in height, at 6 by 4-1/2 by 13-3/4 inches. It can do a decent job of heating a small room – say under 10×10 feet – but don’t get this model if you want to heat a larger space, especially in a cold climate or in a room that is poorly insulated.

Personal space heaters 750-900 watts

The last category of personal space heater I will cover are those with a lower power setting of 750 or up, but below 1,000. These heaters all have a high rating of 1,500 watts, which is enough to warm a reasonably large room, but on their low power setting they are more suitable to warm a small space.

The Delonghi Capsule Solo fan heater comes with an adjustable thermostat, and has one of the lowest wattages of a personal space heater, at 360 watts. It is tiny – a mere 4 x 6 x 7 inches. It’s quieter than many older heaters and has the usual safety features of overheating protection and automatic shutoff if it tips over.

It comes with a handy carrying strap, although something this small you can probably carry in one hand, strap or no strap! It’s a good personal space heater to carry around with you – put it on your desk, dining room table, a night stand when you sleep, the bathroom counter (away from the bath) while you bathe…. Its grill can be tilted slightly so you can project the heat upward.

Also note that it does not have an auto shut off feature (other than the overheat protection feature); unless you unplug it, it will continue heating indefinitely at whatever temperature you set it.

This 500 watt personal space heater comes in a two pack for under $40 (as of November 2023) or as a single heater for about $25. It’s tiny at 5x5x7 inches. It has an analog thermostat which allows you to choose any heat setting up to the full 500 watts (so it claims – but that really just means the heat turns on and off at different frequencies – what do you expect for $25 a pop?).

It’s quiet and has overheat protection. It can be mounted on a wall permanently, or you can carry it around with you as a personal space heater. Sometimes analog is the better choice – no need to cycle through all the controls to change the temperature by just 5 degrees, as you do with some digital-thermostat space heaters. For a small (e.g. 10×10 or smaller) room it may take a while to warm the room up (probably 15-20 minutes) but it should be able to keep it warm once it reaches comfort temperature.

The Optimus 2-speed fan heater weighs barely 5 lbs and is 10.5″ tall, which makes it easy to carry around as a personal space heater. It runs at 750 or 1500 watts, and also comes with a fan-only mode, so you can use it both to stay wam in winter, and to cool down in hot weather. It has the usual safety features of overheating shutoff and tip-over shutoff, so you can set it under your office desk at your feet (in low-power mode) and not worry about knocking it over and setting your cables and power PC supplies ablaze!

As a personal space heater the Optimus is high powered, so probably too warm to put under an enclosed desk, but should be fine for heating a small room. Optimus has been around a long time in the electric heater business so they tend to be dependable and of high quality.

Vornado makes some of the best heaters and fans on the market, and this one is priced accordingly. For a personal space heater it is perhaps well above what one would want to pay; I wouldn’t recommend it for heating under your desk or table because you can get pretty much the same capabilities for far less money. But for heating a small – or even a large – room, this Vornado heater does have some appealing features, like many of its Vornado brethren. It has a very accurate digital control; its high-powered fan and industry-leading air distribution system help it get the warm air spread throughout a room very quickly; and it operates very quietly. The Vornado stays cool to the touch so is safe to operate around children and pets.

One of the greatest things about this digital heater is that, unlike some cheaper, more simply designed heaters with a thermostat, it doesn’t constantly go on and off – on when the temperature dips below the thermostat minimum, and on when it reaches the maximum a few degrees higher. Instead it continuously varies the amount of heat going to the element and the speed of the fan, so that you have a steady, even heat without constant changes in airflow or noise.

This is another surprisingly small heater, considering the heat it puts out – and it is one of the bestselling heaters in its class, which is surprising considering its price tag. But you get what you pay for – you can certainly get a lot more heat output for $115, but if you want a reliable, powerful personal space heater, the Vornado EH1 digital vortex heater does the trick.

The DeLonghi DCH5915ER ceramic heater has two heating modes – full-on 1500 watts, and a low wattage mode in which it alternates between full energy mode and low energy mode. It is a bit larger than some – 14″ tall, because of its pedestal – but that pedestal supports an oscillating mode which allows for better heat distribution, making it a great choice for a personal space heater. Like some of the other more inexpensive heaters reviewed here, it has a fan-only mode that means you can use it to keep cool in hot weather, and it also has a freeze-prevention mode that keeps the temperature above 44F to prevent pipes from freezing (or at least, to keep the heat going full blast should temperatures dip that low).

This is a digital heater – it provides accurate temperature control. While I think this is a great personal space heater, I caution against unrealistic expectations around energy savings. The marketing materials for this heater make it sound like the low-energy setting is an ‘eco’ or energy-saving setting. That’s true, but as with any electric space heater, if the unit is in a mode where it uses 20% (or 25%, or whatever percent) less energy, it produces exactly that much less heat.

This Lasko ceramic heater is near the top end of the wattage range for a personal space heater, at 900 or 1500 watts depending on the setting. It’s also at the top end in terms of customer satisfaction and sales – one of the most popular on the market today, not surprising given that it can sometimes be had for as little as $40.

A little heavier than some models, this personal space heater tips the scales at about 4 lbs. But it still fits under the 1-foot-tall form factor. Note that it has a comfort level dial, not a true thermostat, as with many of the other cheaper models of personal space heater, so you can’t easily set it to stay at one constant temperature except after repeated experiments. As for noise level, it’s a reasonably quiet personal space heater but not whisper quiet like some.

Think globally, heat locally

Almost every personal space heater I’ve described above will save you money fairly quickly, compared to heating your entire home, if you use it to keep just a small area warm where you’re active. If you’re paying $60 a month for natural gas heating through the winter – and in Toronto where I live we sometimes hit $120 to $160 in January or February – you could probably save $30 or more a month even with the electricity these heaters use, if you turn your furnace thermostat down (reduce heat globally) and heat locally where you are in your house instead. You can carry any of these heaters from room to room, as they are compact and lightweight, and many of them can heat a cold room up quickly. For under-desk or counter-top use, your choice of whether to go for the low-end of the wattage range, or the high end, really depends on how quickly you want the area to warm up, and how cold is the room you’re in.

But regardless, a personal space heater will go a long way to making you comfortable in winter without breaking your household utility budget, and most of these units will literally pay for themselves within weeks of purchase.

2 replies
  1. Michael Cercowski
    Michael Cercowski says:

    It’s just incorrect to claim that heater effectiveness is directly proportional to wattage. Yes, all electric heaters are “100% efficient” but that’s only because the lost energy is still heat, and is just added back to the output to get 100% again. This, however, does not address *heating effectiveness* or how well it actually heats an area. Small units with appropriately-sized fans are usually best at this. I use the “My Heat” 200 watt units myself, because they put out a lot of heat for the power consumed. However, I also have a couple of “milk house” type heaters that I rarely use, because their too-hot heating elements, combined with undersized, inefficient fans, poorly heat even small spaces while consuming large amounts of power. How can a heater do this? Simply by heating the area immediately in front of the heater more than necessary (through low fan output, usually) while providing too little heat to areas farther away. When you see glowing heating elements, you are usually seeing poor heating effectiveness, because fan-forced units heat best when the elements are hot, but no so hot that they glow visibly. Ceramic heaters are generally the most effective heaters, although I also have a couple of coil-type heaters that provide plenty of heat from 750 watts (on Low) because the fans are well suited to the heat output, and heat a whole room fairly evenly.

    We also use several electric oil-filled radiators, and these are great for smaller areas (like bedrooms) with little air movement. Yes, they heat the air around them much more than the air 10 feet away, but by using them on their 600 watt settings we get a slow, quiet heat that is good for maintaining the temperature in a room, as opposed to warming it quickly. The type of heater you want depends on the exact heating situation, but never assume that the number of watts consumed will tell you how well the heater works.

    Reply
    • Robin
      Robin says:

      You’ll notice that nowhere in this article do I claim that all electric heaters are 100% effective. They are 100% energy efficient. I agree that different heaters are effective at spreading heat in different ways, and your choice of heater depends on whether you are trying to heat an entire space, a particular area of that space, or a person in that space. See my article on Energy Efficient Electric Heaters for more details on the difference between effective and efficient and for guidance on which kinds of heaters are most appropriate for which task.

      Reply

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