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Keen to optimise home heating? See our advice on boiler controls and thermostats , smart meters , and loft insulation
Out of the box, the panel heater can either be wall-mounted or it can have feet screwed into place so that it can be free-standing. With the latter, the feet are fiddly to screw into place and the instruction manual doesn’t tell you which way round they should go; it just says that if the heater is tilting, you’ve got them on incorrectly.
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Portable electric heaters use electricity, which costs 27.35p/kWh under the current energy price cap. Depending on how effective the heater is, they can take anything from 30 minutes to an hour to notably raise the temperature of a medium-sized room, so if you're only planning on using it until the room gets up to temperature, it will likely cost you between 28 and 55p. Frost protection The heater can be set to heat automatically when the temperature drops below 5°C, but you'll need to have it on standby for it to run, so this can limit its usefulness. Adjustable thermostat Using this function, a portable heater will heat the room and when the desired temperature is reached, it will try to maintain the room at that temperature. Most of the cheaper, simpler heaters we tested have a dial thermostat that doesn't let you choose specific temperatures in °C. You'll likely need to buy a more expensive model for that. Our tests also found that they're rarely 100% accurate and will probably think the room is a couple of °C warmer or cooler than it is. 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.
In our tests, we set every heater to run at full blast so you can see the maximum amount it cost to heat our medium-sized test room. If you have the thermostat of your heater set to a desired temperature, the heater will toggle on and off once it reaches that temperature – depending on what's needed to maintain it. The heater won't operate continuously, so won't cost you as much to run. Are electric heaters cheaper to use than central heating? Convector heaters are usually taller than fan heaters, but thin and light – making them larger, but still relatively easy to move between rooms.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. We use a force meter to record how much is needed to topple each heater over and a decibel meter to measure how much noise each one makes while running. 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. The heater can shut off automatically by setting time schedules in the app or using the timer function
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