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.
I like the giant UL Listed certificate being handed to the Amish Guy – I can go to the Dollar Store and any electrical item will have a UL Label on it.
It looks to me like these Amish Craftsman are assembling these from a stack of pieces already made, who knows where and by who.
It is just a electric heater in a cabinet with a fake fire.
I just ordered one from HSN $79 on flex pay as I couldnt afford the full price in the ads I had been seeing in the Sunday paper. Thank goodness I found this blog. I called and cancelled my order!! I heat my house with off road diesel fuel (6 gals every day and 1/2 and it’s not even cold out yet). Any ideas how I can be warm and save money? Can’t use wood stove due to allergies.
Hi Danell, I saw the HSN commercial (on YouTube) and those people are very good at selling. It’s their business. The HSN pitch focuses not so much on the savings, but on how ‘real’ the flame looks and the quality of the mantel. My original goal in writing the blog article was to refute the over-the-top approach to pushing this product, particularly the potential for energy savings. The only way you’ll save money with an electric space heater is if you heat only the rooms you occupy. This may be practical for some, but not for most people who don’t want the rooms in the house too chilly to use during the winter season. Sure, the electric heater comes on and starts heating instantly, but if a room is at 50 degrees F, it can take hours for it to come back up to a comfortable temperature using a 5000 BTU/hr heater. The contents of a room have a lot of thermal capacity and so they keep drawing the heat out of the air as fast as the heater warms it.
If you’re using 6 gallons of diesel per day and 1/2, your current heating requirements are about 480,000 BTU per day assuming 80% efficiency of your furnace. It would take about 4 of these 5000 BTU/hr heaters running 24 hours a day to produce that much heat. Assuming an electricity cost of $.10/kWh, your electric bill would be an additional $430/month if you did that. I checked the price of heating oil and it’s at $2.74/gallon and so there would probably be no savings in converting from diesel to home heating oil. Based on your 4 gallon/day usage, your heating bill is approaching $300/month assuming you’re getting it for $2.50/gallon.
The easiest way to reduce heating costs in the winter is to reduce your home’s temperature. In general, each 1 degree F lower you can set your thermostat, you’ll see a 3% decrease in your heating bill. The biggest potential for savings are at night, since you’re sleeping and you won’t even know the rest of the house is cold. You could use an electric blanket and comfortably reduce your home’s temperature by as much as 10 degrees at night, but if you do that, I’d suggest using a programmable thermostat to set it back about an hour before you get up, or else you’ll be reluctant to get out of your warm bed. 🙂
I don’t know if natural gas in an option for you, but its cost per BTU is about half of what people pay for oil and propane. And a heat pump may also be an option, which is about 3x more efficient than a resistive type heater, but they are quite a bit more expensive than a traditional furnace, so there are more up-front costs. And should the temperature drop below 0 degrees F, they tend to use a resistive heater as a backup, so they get very expensive to use when you need heat the most.
As someone who was raised in Northern Indiana in an area populated with Amish, I can 99.99% guarantee you that the Amish have nothing to do with this product. If you notice on their website, they actually capitalize Amish Craftmanship, as if its a product. Furthermore, it is correct that Amish do not like to have their pictures taken. I can’t imagine any Amish person allowing themselves to be in a TV commercial. Also, every single Amish person I have ever met has an accent. Their first language is not English. They speak English, but to each other, they speak Pennsylvania Dutch. It gives them an accent that sounds quite German. The man on the TV had a southern accent.
This company should be stopped! Not only are they taking advantage of customers by ripping them off with their scams, but they are taking advantage of the Amish as well. They are using the good Amish name to sell a piece of crap heater from China. And, I’m sure their lawyers have already checked and found out that the Amish would not sue them because of their religious beliefs. It is absolutely despicable what they are doing. I would rather freeze to death than give them my money.