The first cold morning of the year is when the little heater comes out of the closet. It feels like the thrifty move, and sometimes it is.
Below: what a space heater really costs by the hour, the window unit that's still letting the outside in, the fireplace sending your heat up the chimney, the appliance that beats your sink, and a heater that runs on a tenth of the power.
Reply and tell us: which room is always the cold one at your place? We read every one.
What a Space Heater Really Costs
Image: The Home Wire
A space heater only saves you money when the rest of the house gets colder while it runs. Everything else is arithmetic.
Most plug-in heaters top out at 1,500 watts. That's about the most a standard 120-volt outlet is built to feed, since 1,500 watts at 120 volts draws 12.5 amps.
On high, that heater uses 1.5 kilowatt-hours every hour.
TLDR: a kilowatt-hour is the unit your utility bills you for. It's 1,000 watts running for one hour.
The national average home electricity price was 18.31 cents per kilowatt-hour in July, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration. So on high, one heater costs:
About 27 cents an hour
About $2.20 for an eight-hour night
About $66 for thirty nights
Your rate may be higher or lower, so swap in the number from your own bill. A heater with a thermostat cycles off once the room is warm, which brings the real figure down.
One thing the boxes won't tell you: every plug-in electric heater turns all of its electricity into heat. None of them is more efficient than another. What differs is how the heat gets to you.
A heat pump plays a different game. ENERGY STAR says an air-source heat pump can deliver up to three times more heat than the electricity it uses. If your home heats with one, a space heater is almost always the pricier way to warm a room.
Here's where the heater wins and where it loses:
It saves money when you turn the whole-house thermostat down several degrees and heat only the room you're sitting in.
It costs you money when it runs on top of full central heat. Then it's just a second bill.
And keep three feet of clear space around it, plugged straight into the wall. We went through why on September 21.
The Window Unit Still Letting the Cold In
Image: The Home Wire
If a window air conditioner spent the summer in your bedroom, it's probably still there. For most of us it stays until spring.
That's an expensive habit. The unit is a metal box with vents open to the outside, and the accordion panels on its sides are little more than thin plastic.
ENERGY STAR's advice is plain: take the unit out at the end of the cooling season if you can, or use a properly sized cover for the winter.
Taking it out is the better fix. It's also heavy, and it sits in an open window, so it's a two-person job.
Unplug it and let any water drain out.
Have a second person hold the unit from inside before anything comes loose.
Undo the screws or brackets holding it to the window frame.
Lift the sash and walk the unit in together.
Close and lock the window, then store the unit upright.
If you rent and it's bolted in, or you just can't face it, cover it instead. Put a fitted cover on the outside, then seal the gaps around the side panels from inside.
Frost King's Air Conditioner Weatherseal Tape, $13.95 for two, is a foam strip made for exactly those gaps. It comes back off in spring.
The Fireplace Sending Your Heat Upstairs
Image: The Home Wire
On Friday we covered the checks before the first fire of the year. This is the other half: what the fireplace costs you when nothing's burning.
An open damper is a hole in your roof. The warm air in the room rises straight up the chimney, all day and all night, and your furnace keeps paying to replace it.
A fire doesn't fix that as much as you'd think. Public Service Company of Oklahoma puts it bluntly: an open fireplace lets 85% of its heat escape up the chimney.
So an open fire is mostly for the look and the smell. It's a lovely evening, and it's a poor heater.
The cheap habits:
Close the damper whenever the fireplace isn't in use.
Wait until the fire is completely out first, embers included. Close it early and smoke and carbon monoxide come into the room.
If you never use the fireplace at all, ask a chimney pro about plugging and sealing the flue, or fitting a damper that seals at the top of the chimney.
Not sure which way yours is set? Hold the back of your hand just under the opening. A cool draft falling on it means the damper is open.
Your Dishwasher Beats Your Sink
Plenty of people still wash by hand to save money. The numbers run the other way.
Per ENERGY STAR, running a certified dishwasher instead of washing by hand saves about 8,400 gallons of water a year. It also cuts utility bills by about $220 a year and gives you back more than 230 hours.
Most of that money is hot water. A tap running while you scrub is a tap your water heater is paying for.
If you don't have a dishwasher, you can still get most of the way there:
Fill one side of the sink with hot soapy water, or use a dish tub if you have one basin.
Wash everything in that water, cleanest things first.
Rinse in a second tub of clean water or in one short batch at the end.
Keep the hot tap off while you scrub.
The bill comes from the running tap, and none of these steps needs one.
A 150-Watt Heater for the Cold Desk
If the cold spot in your house is the desk where you work all day, you don't need to heat the room. You need to heat your legs.
The one we'd point you to is the Cozy Legs Flat Panel Heater, at $69.99 with its stand. It runs on 150 watts, a tenth of a standard space heater.
At the same national average rate, that's under 3 cents an hour, or about 22 cents for an eight-hour workday against about $2.20 for a 1,500-watt heater. Over a month of workdays the gap is roughly $40, so it can pay for itself in about two months if it replaces the big heater.
It's a thin metal panel, 25 by 20 inches and 2 inches thick, that stands under a desk or mounts on a wall. A built-in thermostat holds the surface around 130 F, there's a roller switch on the cord, and it's ETL-certified for zero clearance.
We haven't run this one through a winter ourselves. The specs and the price come from the maker's own store.
That said, know what you're buying. It warms what's right in front of it, and the maker says plainly it isn't meant to heat a whole room. If you want the whole bedroom warm, this won't do it.
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One quick tap
Do you run a space heater once it gets cold?
That's Tuesday: what a space heater really costs, the window unit to pull, the damper to close, the sink that costs more than the machine, and a heater for your legs.
Tonight's job takes ten seconds. If the fireplace is cold and the damper's open, close it.
Forward this to whoever in your house owns the space heater.
See you tomorrow.
The Home Wire
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