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Auke de Haan
Auke de Haan

Posted on Originally published at fireplacecompared.com

4 Ways People Heat One Room Without Running the Whole Furnace

Heating a single room you're actually sitting in, instead of the whole house, is usually the cheaper move. Here are four ways people do it, with the real tradeoffs.

Space heaters are the cheapest entry point, usually $25 to $120, fully portable, and capped at about 1,500 W on a standard US outlet. No install, no flame effect, just heat wherever you put it.

Electric fireplaces run the same 1,500 W heater as a space heater, so the heat output is identical watt for watt. What you're paying extra for ($130 to $1,500+) is the cabinet, the flame display, and often a flame-only mode that runs on a few dozen watts with the heater switched off.

Radiant panel heaters mount on a wall and heat objects and people directly rather than warming the air first, which some people find more comfortable in drafty rooms, though they're usually slower to raise the room temperature than a fan-driven space heater.

Heated blankets and throws aren't room heaters at all, but for one person sitting still they use a fraction of the wattage of any of the above, which is why they often get paired with a lower thermostat setting rather than a second heater.

I went deeper on the electric fireplace vs. space heater comparison specifically, cost per hour, safety, and which one actually suits a bedroom, over on Fireplace Compared: https://fireplacecompared.com/guides/electric-fireplace-vs-space-heater

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