My Quest to Find a Well-Designed, Efficient Electric Heater

Nothing quite beats the joy of a sunroom: as someone who likes to spend as much time outside as possible, even past the point of comfort (I thrived during rainy, freezing, outdoor Covid dining) the second best option is to feel like you’re outdoors, but with the benefit of walls to keep out the bugs and a roof to keep off the rain.

When I moved into my house and saw that the sunroom was essentially just a row of windows with a few strip of walls in between, I knew it was where I would put my office and spend nearly all of my time (we also use it as a guest bedroom, so occasionally I cede the space). But the rub was that the sunroom—and a smaller one downstairs—was actually an uninsulated three-season porch, which made it fairly uninhabitable throughout the winter months. We could leave the doors open to the rest of the boiler-heated house, which would allow some heat in, but the lack of insulation meant that the radiators were essentially pumping hot air into a room where it would just leach through the walls, and this would add a lot of dollar signs to our heating bill. This past summer, we had the sunrooms insulated, which extended the usability of the rooms a bit: While the rooms still didn’t have heat, they weren’t quite as cold as the outdoors, and the insulation made leaving the doors open a little more successful.

Still, this left us with insulated rooms that were a bit warmer, but not much. Our three season sunroom was now three and a half seasons, but I wanted—nay, needed—to push it to four. The most permanent, effective and expensive approach would be installing more baseboard heaters in the newly insulated rooms. That would require drilling into walls, running more pipes, etc—aka a lot of things I probably couldn’t learn how to do on YouTube myself. It would be a worthwhile investment, were we interested in a permanent solution. However, when our boiler inevitably fails tomorrow or next winter or several years from now, we’ll get a heat pump—so a permanent solution to a temporary problem doesn't seem like the best move.

For a long time, oil and gas were one of the most efficient ways to heat homes. But the clean energy transition has made electric heat more ubiquitous, more efficient, and in some instances, cheaper than fossil fuel heat. In the winters, prior to our insulation, we turned to an old faithful: The electric space heater. A friend to all those with drafty windows, bad circulation and horrendous gas bills, space heaters are largely efficient at providing direct, limited heat to small areas. They are also, despite safety improvements, still fire hazards!

The maximum suggested output of a standard home outlet, according to the National Electrical Code, is 1500 watts, and every 1500W space heater will be capable of delivering the same amount of electric heat. Any big talk around some being hotter than others is just successful marketing. However, when it comes to noise or efficiency of distribution, your mileage may vary: I found the oscillating Lasko tower adequate for warming in general, while the more petite Vornado was good for more targeted attention to the limbs and extremities. When buying a space heater, you should always look for those that will automatically turn off if tipped over. The Vornado was particularly sensitive, shutting down every time I nudged it or moved it slightly, but I would always prefer a fire hazard to err on the side of caution.

Ultimately, though convenient, most space heaters are a bit of an eyesore—and the ones that deliberately try not to be are a little goofy looking. I set out to try and find a more refined, semi-permanent solution, one that may not be aesthetically pleasing per se, but would perhaps blend into the room a little better.

Enter electric baseboard heaters, the plug and play alternative to the built in versions. Because these heaters run on electric heat, they do not require the same pipe work that extending our existing oil heater system would. Ultimately, these heaters are capped at 1500W as well, so you're still hitting the upper limit on the amount of heat a single unit can provide. But you have the choice of purchasing either a convection or hydronic version: while the convection runs like the space heater (or a toaster), with coils that heat up and cool down rapidly, the hydronic versions use electricity to heat a pipe within the unit filled with oil. The heater operates a bit like a self-contained version of the house’s integrated baseboard system, and the result is a heater that heats up a bit slower than the purely electric version, but which retains heat longer. The hydronic option, though initially more expensive, is ultimately more energy and cost efficient.

Cadet seems to have cornered the market on baseboard heaters, and so I ordered a 1500 watt hydronic heater to test. As expected, it heated the room about as adequately as the oscillating Lasko tower. But by placing the heater parallel to the wall and obscuring the cord, it blends in much more easily than a free standing space heater, and because it’s portable, you have options for where it can go in your space. For our smaller sun room downstairs, I tested a Kelvin from Boldr. True to the characteristics of a DTC brand, the Kelvin ships with a built-in smart thermostat and has its own app, which comes with the expected perks of real-time cost monitoring, remote access and schedule setting. Rather than take up floor space, the unit is hung on the wall and resembles a wall-mounted television. The installation was easy—though hard to do as one person; it’s heavy—and though we do not allow Alexa into our home, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that its compatibility with Google Assistants will likely be a plus for some users.

The Kelvin runs a bit differently from traditional electric heaters, in that it uses infrared technology. Infrared heat radiates heat to warm objects rather than heating the air, which makes the heating process more efficient and uses less wattage (the Kelvin tops out at 750W for their large units). Its heating capabilities so far seem on par with the higher wattage baseboard heaters, though much like the hydronic heat, it takes a little longer to bring the room up to 68 degrees, where our home thermostat is set during the day.

All in all, while all our tested semipermanent solutions certainly raised the heat of the rooms, keeping the doors open to the rest of the house and allowing the main heat to also circulate through the rooms, really helped (note that if you are to go down this route, make sure the unheated room is insulated, otherwise you will be sending all the heat from the main house directly outside). And now I can wait for our boiler to officially bite the dust from the comfort of a four-season porch.

Top image courtesy of Boldr

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