Recommend me a good budget space heater

It gets cold here during the winter and I want to pick up a space heater to help keep me warm. Looking for a small budget heater that can heat up a small room (less than 200 sq ft). Portability a plus so I can move it to my bathroom when I take a shower. Tell me what to look for!

I don't really have any need to run the furnace even during the winter months here but I do use space heaters occasionally.

I've found that the Heat dishes are pretty effective, and the little Honeywell electric, shaped like a small cylinder, works pretty good too. Both are small and I even leave on in my most used bathroom during the winter.

I assume you mean electric?

When it comes to fires, I am a certified card-carrying coward. Electric heaters with glowing elements scare me. For this reason I really like oil filled radiator heaters. They produce the same BTU's as other heaters, but the heated surface area is MUCH larger, meaning that for the same BTU output the temperature of that heated surface is also much lower. There are no exposed filaments and no part of the heater gets hot enough to start a fire even if you drape a towel or a curtain over it. Most are ~$70 although my wife and I got the one for our bathroom for $40. I'd pony up the extra $$ and get one, just for the safety.

:buddies:

Edit: Here is the one my wife and I have in our bathroom @ Amazon for $40.

Yes, I meant electric. I plan to keep it simple and plug it into an outlet. There's also a space issue, so keeping the heater on the small side is a plus.

Why are the only repsonders from the south? Arizona and Florida? You guys don't use heaters!!!!

What do you mean by "budget?" I like tiny ceramic heaters (instant warmth) that I can easily take from room to room, but they consume a lot of electricity, so I don't know if it saves or costs more than heating the whole house via a forced air heating system...

??? Oregon here.

A 1500 watt heater produces the same amount of heat. How they distribute that heat is a different issue entirely. Ceramic core heaters spew out relatively few cubic feet of hot air, but what is spewed is intensely hot air. So for smaller areas it feels warmer, like a around a desk or near your feet. If you just want warmer more evenly distributed warm air quickly then those shop-type stamped steel heaters with the old school metal fans and wire heating filaments do a great job of raising the air temperature. Infrared solutuions are great because they project heat into actual objects, though much of it is "wasted" in convection losses, just feel the hot air rising from them, shorter wavelength carbon heaters glow more orange and project heat better than the dishes with the metal coils. In my time spent in the navy in Connecticut inside barracks that often lost heat when temperatures were well below freezing the best way to keep warm while sleeping was actually to place a small ceramic heater under your bed and "seal" the heat in the bed with furniture so that all the heat went into warming the bed. This kept the bed nice and toasty even when a bottle of water would freeze if left out in the room.

Personally, I like halogen heaters. They are those with anywhere from one to three horizontal lamps that make a red-orange light and give out quite a lot of heat for their size.
They have a very important advantage when compared to fan heaters: they create no air currents, so you can use them while you're showering without feeling like you're freezing when you step out of the stall. They are also completely quiet, and the lamps do a decent job of radiating heat at normal room distances.
On the other hand, they do give out a significant amount of light. It's perfectly possible to have a halogen heater in a room by night and require no other source of light to avoid bumping into things. They aren't therefore suitable if you're sensitive to light and want to use them while sleeping, or if you want to avoid nasty reflections in a computer screen or something.

There's another kind, oil-filled electric radiators, but those do a rather lousy job of projecting heat around - they basically send hot air straight up due to convection. You can put a fan on them to move the hot air around, but if you're going to use a fan you might as well buy a fan heater in the first place.

Soleus MS-09 dish halogen heater works great

This is the one I use. Works perfectly. Quiet, effective. Has multiple power settings 600/900/1500 watts. Warms all the way down to the floor. No cold feet.

Delonghi Oil-Filled Radiator Heater

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_03276515000P

I think they make a smaller GFI model for the bathroom.

Vornado DVTH and it's a fan in the summer time.

springnr said:

Vornado DVTH and it's a fan in the summer time.

Click to expand...

:thumbsup:
It's not cheap, though.

NA8 said:

This is the one I use. Works perfectly. Quiet, effective. Has multiple power settings 600/900/1500 watts. Warms all the way down to the floor. No cold feet.

Delonghi Oil-Filled Radiator Heater

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_03276515000P

I think they make a smaller GFI model for the bathroom.

Click to expand...

That's just like the one we've used for several years. For the first year or two we used it in our computer/home theater room since it is colder than the rest of the house because it is a converted garage. It was great because it is silent, while a lot of the other space heaters we've had were quite noisy. We've since moved it into our 4 year old daughter's room for some supplemental heat.

Also prefer the oil-filled radiator heaters.

I've got a couple of these
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0006DNMZG/?tag=cpf0b6-20

They're very small and work well in bathrooms or small rooms up to 200 square feet. They don't have any exposed hot surfaces which I also like. They're not fancy but they seem reliable. I think mine were purchased at target for about $25 bucks.

springnr said:

Vornado DVTH and it's a fan in the summer time.

Click to expand...

+1. We keep one in the bathroom and it does a great job of quickly warming things up.

I highly recommend the Honeywell Heat Giant fan-forced heater. It is the best heater I own and heats up a large room very fast. I have a standard radiant heater, a radiant quartz heater, and many other fan forced ones and none of them seem to do as well as this one. I did own an oil filled radiator heater that broke, and it worked well but not as good as the Honeywell.

I also own a "professional" ceramic heater, but it still doesn't heat the room nearly as well as the Heat Giant.

NA8 said:

Delonghi Oil-Filled Radiator Heater

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_03276515000P

Click to expand...

I too, or is it 3, like and use the Delonghi Oil-Filled heaters. I have 2 of an older model that I've used off and on for about 20yrs. Never had a problem with either of them. The one drawback, if it is one, is that it takes awhile to heat up. It doesn't give instant heat. But if you're going to heat a room for longer periods of time, I think they work best.

I use an oil heater in the winter in my basement modding room and it does a very good job at keeping me nice and toasty!

Why is it that some post after mine are in the future? 10/13??