Cheaper electric bill....portable quartz heater?? or portable oil radiator??

I'm guessing you have electric heat now?


Ok...the way a portable electric heater can save you money is if you turn down the heat everywhere except where you are and put the portable heater in there. Quartz or oil filled are no more efficient than your baseboard electric, but there are some ways to use them to save some money.


The oil filled radiators are nothing more than a heating element, like a toaster, that heats up the oil. They take awhile to heat up, so they are not as handy, plus they are not as portable as Quartz heaters.


Quartz heaters, as long as they are ';open';, that is...as long as the quartz elements are visible without any glass or anything between you and the quartz are more useful for this. The way they heat is with long-wave infrared radiation. When you sit in front of a fire and feel the heat, that is long wave infrared radiation you feel. So the nice thing about that kind of heater is that you can point them at whatever you want to warm up, and they don't try to heat up all the air in the room, like the oil filled type do, and you feel the heat very quickly. They are also lighter and easier to move.





The cost of operating one depends on how often you use it, and how much electricity it takes. The math is pretty simple: Take the size of the heater in Watts times the number of hours per day you run it, and divide by 1000. That gives you the kilowatt hours of electricity used. Take that times your rate per kilowatt hour.


So if you get a 1000w heater, and run it 10 hours per day, that's 10 Kilowatt hours. If your rate is 12 cents, that's $1.20 per day.





You can get a cheap quartz heater, and it will be as efficient as an expensive one.


If you don't turn down the heat everywhere else, it won't save you a nickle, though.


If you can insulate more, that is the real way to save money!