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Heating your home to the ideal temperature during winter is no easy task. With such a wide range of options available, choosing the most cost-effective and efficient heating can be tricky and time-consuming. Fortunately, you don’t have to make the choice alone - whether you’ve got gas or electricity available, find the heater to keep you cosy all winter.
Convection Heaters
Designed to provide background warmth, they warm the air near the element or body of the heater. The warm air circulates by natural convection around the room. Many have a fan, which provides faster warm-up and more even heating.
The most popular type of convection heater is the upright oil-filled column heater.
Benefits:
- Great for bedrooms, living rooms and studies.
- Sturdy, durable and reliable – offering precise thermostat control
- Extremely safe, as there are no exposed grills or flames
A box type with a heating element in the bottom and a grille at the top to let the warm air out.
Benefits:
- Great for living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms
- Stylish and space-saving design
- Offers excellent temperature precision and thermostat control
For fast heating and advanced technology electric heaters are the perfect choice. They create the illusion of flames by shining the light of an LED onto a spinning refractor that is made up of 3D patterns. Light reflects off the refractor, emulating the light and glow of a real fireplace.
Benefits:
- Great for bedrooms, studies or small living rooms
- Safe and effective
- Creates a cosy ambience
Fan heaters sit on the floor and provide blasts of warm air directly onto you. They're not as good as convection heaters for providing general background warmth, but are fantastic at offering direct and focused heat.
Benefits:
- Create a lot of heat for their relatively small size
- Portable - can be used in any room of your house
- Versatile and very affordable
These have glowing electric elements with reflectors to radiate heat directly onto you. They provide quick directional heat to a small area of a room and also provide some convection heat.
Benefits:
- Radiant heating systems are entirely quiet
- No ductwork means that dust and other allergens won’t spread through air vents
- The most efficient choice for outdoor heating
A gas heater works by burning natural gas or propane to generate heat. Cold air from the home's ductwork enters the heater and is warmed up by a heat exchanger. The hot air is blown throughout the home via the ducts, and the exhaust is blown out of the furnace through a vent to the outside of the home.
Benefits:
- Great for living rooms
- An energy efficient alternative to electricity
- Offers precise and reliable heating
Choosing the Right Size
If you’re buying a new heater, size matters. Big heaters can use more energy or gas than you require and small heaters may not be able to efficiently handle heating large rooms. To get an idea of how large or powerful a heater you need this winter, start by measuring the size of the area you want to heat. Multiply the length of a room by its width to get its floor space in square metres.
For an insulated room with average ceiling heights (e.g. 2.4 metres), you’ll need a heater with an output of approximately 100 watts per square metre to heat efficiently. For example:
Area to be heated - Efficient appliance wattage
10sqm room (2mx5m) - 1000w (1kW)
15sqm room (3mx5m) - 1500W (1.5 kW)
24sqm room (6mx4m) - 2400W (2.4 kW)
The same applies to gas heaters as well as electric heaters. If the kW output of a gas figure is not available, you can estimate a rough approximation by multiplying the gas input in megajoules (MJ) by 3.6. However, this is not a precise measurement, as the gas input only measures the amount of gas the heater uses – how efficiently it heats is determined by its energy rating (check the star ratings).
Area to be heated - Efficient appliance wattage - Approximate gas heater input
10sqm room (2mx5m) - 1000W (1kW) - 3.6 MJ
15sqm room (3mx5m) - 1500W (1.5 kW) - 5.4 MJ
24 sqm room (6mx4m) - 2400W (2.4 kW) - 8.6 MJ
Anna Faber