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 find it suspicious that the woman who claims she loves her heaters would somehow find herself on this site praising them two years after she says she bought them. I mean, when was the last time you went online to post positive feedback about a product you have had a long time on a site dedicated to exposing a scam? Does she love it so much that she woke up one day and said, “I must go blog about this!”. More likely she works for the Heatsurge. I’d say “she” should feel shame, but something tells me I’d be wasting my breath. Won’t be wasting my money on this one though. Thanks for exposing these predators.
I bought one of these heaters and it is amazing! It doesn’t run up my electric bill at all. It works so well we have to keep it on low all the time, and we decided to take out our furnace. Living in Pennsylvania it gets cold in the winter, and we see no need for our furnace anymore. The homeless actualy had to move a few houses down just to sleep at night because they said it was too hot outside of our house. It’s an amazing product, I also use it for clearing my driveway of snow and ice, and since the mantle is built with Amish pride, I use it during the summer months to. Like when I had a glass of lemonaid in my hand last July, I set that glass down with no problem. It’s great for holding things. I heard they are actually using it in Hati to hold up collapsed buildings. The “Heatsurge” is truly a gift from above. I’m supprised they arent charging double for this wonder product! I love the heatsurge soo much, I asked Chevy to take the heater out of my truck so I could put a Heatsurge in it. I’m not sure if it is true or not, but I am told that the only reason the tropical area of earth is warmer than the rest of the planet is because 7 Heatsurge heaters are located around the equater. The Heatsurge is fantasic product and made so amazingly well. I recommend it to anyone who has Hundreds of Dollars to spend on a chinsy, space heater thats worth about, and I’m being very generous here, 40 Dollars, since it’s in a wood box.
I purchased 2 of these units as gifts for Christmas of 2009. Now, one year later, mine is so noisy we can’t use it and even watch TV or read the newspaper. At least the one we gave my son isn’t noisy – it has the common decency to just quit working!
What an expensive hoax-lesson.