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 agree, they advertised 9 cents an hour to run, that has to be without heat just the fake fire. That’s false advertising to me. My bill was $150-$170 a month. Something should be done about lying to people like that, and we should be compensated for those lies. I remember them saying it only raised their electric bill by 50 cents a month.
“HeaterMan,” above is peddling a heater that is in the same (low) class as the Heat Surge and Eden Pure scam heaters–overpriced and over-hyped, and no better than any number of much less expensive heaters that will do the same job. Ignore HeaterMan and his overpriced heater!
Pros:
Looks nice
Cool to the touch (we have a 6 yr old)
Clean and easy to use
Cons:
Takes awhile to heat a room
Electric bill will go up
You have to have the place to put it
My fiance got sucked in too but not with the amish hook – with the electricity savings. He purchased one for about $300 two years ago for our back tv room which tends to get cold in the winter. Our electric bill skyrocketed! We promptly called the electric company and they said, “How can they (Heatsurge) tell you how much we are going to charge you for electric…”
It does not put out that much heat and takes a while to heat the room. If you have a smaller room that you use once in a blue, go for it. The unit looks fine to me – not spectacular but not like the $25 one at walmart. This year we used it sparingly (thank god for a mild winter), otherwise, I would’ve froze or paid high electric bills.
We have not had any machinical issues with the unit and I could can less about a remote.