I saw a two-page ad in the Rocky Mountain News this week about some new miracle heater called the ‘Amish Heat Surge‘ and it fell into the category of things that sounded to me to be ‘just a little fishy’. Later I saw a commercial for the same product. Sure enough, after doing some calculations, I figured out that this is just a scam to overcharge people for a cheap electric heater made in China. Searching the Internet, I found a few unhappy customers who fell for it. Even though the heaters are ‘free’, you pay $298 for the ‘Amish authentic wood mantles’ that enclose them. In reality, there’s no reason to wrap an electric heater with a wooden box or mantle. It also has some sort of fake fire effect. Oh, and shipping costs $50 EACH. And they’ll stick you with an extended warranty for $28 each. So for around $770, you’d get a pair of heaters that do the same thing as a pair of $27 electric heaters you can pick up at Wal-Mart.
A 5,119 BTU/hr heater generates about 1/20th the heat produced by a household furnace. It will draw 1.5 kW. For every hour this thing runs, it will cost about $.15 in electricity, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but over a 730 hour month, that adds up to an extra $108 on your electric bill. Electric resistive heat is the most expensive way to heat a house. It costs about twice as much per BTU as natural gas heat. Just to put it in another perspective, a 2,100 sq. ft. house in my home state of Colorado uses about 6 therms of natural gas a day in the coldest winter months. At the current gas price of $1.20 per therm, a typical gas bill is $216/month during the winter months. To heat your house to the same temperature with this electric heater, you’d need to have 5 of these heaters operating at the high setting 24 hours a day. The additional monthly charges on your electric bill for just the heaters would be $540!
The ad talks about only using it to heat zones, which can save on your heating bill, of course, but only at the expense of having some of the rooms in your home being uncomfortably chilly. And you can’t really completely turn off your central furnace without the risk of pipes freezing. In other words, if you put a heater like this in the room that has your furnace’s thermostat, and thus your furnace never comes on, you may freeze pipes in a remote part of the house.
The ad is full of high pressure sales nonsense, such as requiring a special savings code that expires in 48 hours, or you’d otherwise pay $587 each! There is a limit of 2 per household and they need to ‘turn away dealers’ because they can’t keep up with demand.
If you’re one of the people reading this article who bought an Amish Heat Surge heater, please note that I mean no disrespect to you. I’m just tired of con artists using slick advertising to suck people into buying things that aren’t worth a fraction of the sales price.
Though I agree with you that these heat surge heaters are over priced and will not save you money as claimed, I can not agree with you regarding your comparison of the $21 Holmes heater as you suggest will do the same job. I know because I bought a couple of them a while ago and I can tell you about the only thing the Holmes heaters are good for are boat anchors though not very good at that either. I have used a number of electric heaters and the Holmes heaters are the least efficient of any that I’ve used. It’s true that gas heat is more cost efficient in comparison to electric heat, but you failed to take into account the efficiency of the heater you are talking about. Gas heaters can run anywhere from 70 to 96 percent efficiency where electric, depending on the model and technology used, can range from 10 to 50 percent efficiency. One of the best are the oil filled heaters. Some infrared heaters can do pretty well, though the better ones are much larger than the Holmes heater you pictured in you blog. Simply doing calculations with out doing the actual testing doesn’t really give you accurate data. When you test the unites, you will find that there are factors that you have over looked that have significant affects on the output. By the way, the only thing I ever found the Holmes heaters useful for was as foot heaters with the heaters on high and very close to my feet. The electric bill went right through the roof.
I haven’t owned a Holmes heater, so I cannot say how well they work, but all electric resistive heaters are 100% efficient. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and if you put 1500 watts of electrical energy into a resistive heater, you’re going to get 1500 watts of heat out of it. Generally, when people talk about energy efficiency, it has to do with the ratio of a desired form of energy such mechanical energy in the case of a motor, or lumens of light in the case of a light bulb, to an undesired form of energy like waste heat. Since the product of a resistive heater is just heat plus a small amount of air movement from the fan (which also turns into heat) the heat output of a resistive heater will always be equal to its electrical input.
In the case of gas heaters, you need to vent them to the atmosphere, so you’ll lose heat through the exhaust pipe, and there’s always the possibility that the fuel will not be completely combusted, so that’s why you see a range of efficiencies for heaters that burn fuel to produce heat.
Heat pumps are sometimes advertised to be more than 100% efficient, but they do not create energy. They work like an air conditioner in reverse, namely, moving thermal energy from one location to another location. They move this thermal energy in the reverse direction it would normally flow which is normally from hot to cold.
There are lots of thanks for a guy who didn’t try one telling everyone else not to try one either. Where I live, homes are built for efficent cooling in the summer. Winter is short and expensive. Fireplaces just suck the heat out of the rest of the house. A space heater adds a “warm spot” to go to. Some people like the warmth of a space heater. Some don’t. That doesn’t make them suckers, or stupid.
If the heater doesn’t meet your expectations FOR ANY REASON – you can return it in 30 days. If it doesn’t perform well – or smokes – etc as many have said – you have a 12 month warranty. Yes – you can buy a 36 month warranty for $36. Have you bought any device or appliance lately that did NOT offer an extended warranty?
Bought one of these and it heated our entire 2500 sq ft house. We didn’t run the furnace at all. The bill for the entire winter totaled $20.00. It snowed 12 inches one night and we set the heater in the front yard, and it melted all the snow in our yard as well as those of the the neighbors on each side of us. We suspect global warming may actually be the result of these heaters, and the polar ice cap melt may be the people up north buying thaese heaters. We have alerted Al Gore. This product is just amazing. What more can I say?