You can easily work out how much heat is required to warm a room of a given size, by using a room size heat calculator. Simply enter in the room dimensions, and the heat calculator will tell you the minimum amount of heat required to do it.

Read: one simple way to adjust your boiler to lower your heating bill to see how you can save money by lowering the temperature of the water supplying your radiators. It is false economy to try and save money by using a smaller heater than the room size calculator advises. By trying to heat a room whose size requires 4kw of heat by using a 2kw convector will result in the room constantly feeling cold, taking many hours to reach a comfortable temperature and mean that the room probably never gets warm enough to switch off the thermostat, so the heater uses power continuously. In this situation you would be much better off using Halogen Heaters for personal comfort. A wide range of heat settings: some only offer a couple of heat settings and basic thermostatic control that gives a vague steer towards hot or cold rather than letting you choose specific temperatures in degrees °C. As you can imagine, pricing is one of the most important factors of any purchasing decision. We can find the perfect product for our needs, that fits the brief in every single way. But if it doesn’t fit our budgets, we simply can’t (or at least shouldn’t) buy it. This story was first published on 7 October 2021 and is updated regularly to reflect new heaters we've tested as well as changing prices and availability of heaters. We're not able to show every retailer and cheaper prices may be available. Prices and availability last updated 26 October 2023. Tagged as:Although the comparison might make your electric heater look cheaper to run, bear in mind that it will only be heating a much smaller area, whereas your central heating will be aiming to heat your whole home. Convector heaters are usually taller than fan heaters, but thin and light – making them larger, but still relatively easy to move between rooms.

If the brand you buy is important to you, our best advice is to spend some time writing up your own list of ideal brands. That way when you come to the point where you’re comparing product options you can filter to only show the products from brands in your list. The next step for us was to look at all of the products that fall within the Heaters and radiators category, of which we found 55 products at Argos. So we pulled together all of the prices of these products to analyse the average prices as well as finding the cheapest and most expensive options.However, many of the 2kW electric heaters we've tested tipped above and below that power output over the course of an hour's use in our tests, resulting in costs from 9p - 83p. The example above uses UK Sterling for the Electricity cost, but this can easily be substituted with other currencies, such as U.S Cents as the calculation method is exactly the same.

So a 2000 Watt Convector heater would use 2 units of Electricity for every hour that it is run, and at 30p per Electricity unit it would cost 2x 30p = 60p per hour to run It is also very important that you work out just how much heat is required to warm the size of room to a comfortable temperature. For example, if a room requires 4kw of heat input to warm it to 21c, then you are unlikely to be able to heat it adequately by using a single 2kw or 3kw convector heater. To produce the 4kw required to heat the room comfortably, you would be advised to use (2x) 2kw convector heaters which would work out very expensive. (This calculation doesn’t apply to Halogen Heaters as they are not warming the entire room). Not many of them have specific temperatures in degrees °C, though, so rather than programming specific temperatures on the thermostat you'll need to experiment with your heater's settings and find the coolest setting that still gives you the warmth you're looking for. Read our full story on illegal and dangerous plug-in mini heaters for sale on online marketplaces to see those we identified as having serious safety risks.

Cold air setting Some fan heaters can help cool you down too. They're not nearly as effective as a dedicated air conditioner, but a light breeze of cold air is better than nothing. so we use the following basic maths equation to work out the running cost of an appliance for any period of time With that in mind, you won't be surprised to hear that you'll need to run it for a bit longer than other heaters to benefit from the heat it gives out.