Room heaters for the one room that is always cold

Why one room is always colder

• It sits above an unheated garage or a cold crawlspace
• It is at the end of a long duct run and barely gets airflow
• It has more exterior wall and window than the rest of the house
• It is below grade, where basements stay cool year round
• It was an addition, a conversion or a finished attic

Fixing it with a room heater

Rather than raising the house thermostat by two degrees for twelve hours a day, you add a couple of hundred watts of heat to one room while you are in it. The rest of the house never notices, and neither does your furnace.

RapidHeat holds the temperature you choose, from 15°C for a cool sleeping room to 32°C for a bathroom or a workshop corner, and shuts itself off on the timer.

How many rooms are you fixing?

• Bedroom, nursery or spare room up to roughly 12 m² (130 sq ft) — one unit
• Home office, den or hobby room — one unit beside the desk
• Basement corner or finished rec-room nook — one unit, two if the space is open
• Bedroom plus home office — the 2-pack, which is why it is our most popular order
• Open-plan living areas, uninsulated garages and workshops — a plug-in 120 V heater is the wrong tool

Safe room heating

• Plug straight into a wall outlet, never an extension cord or power bar
• Keep a metre of clear space in front of the grille
• Never cover the unit or use it to dry clothes
• Use the 1–12 hour timer instead of leaving it running unattended
• Overheat cut-out and tip-over shut-off do the rest automatically

Sizing a room heater properly

The usual rule of thumb is about 10 watts per square foot of well-insulated space, so a 1,500 W heater covers roughly 130–150 sq ft, or 12–14 m². A 3 m by 4 m bedroom is 12 m² and well inside that.

Poor insulation, single-glazed windows, high ceilings or a room over an unheated garage all push the requirement up. In those rooms the heater still helps, but expect it to run more of the time.

What it costs to heat one room

With the thermostat cycling, a 1,500 W unit averages around 0.75 kWh for every hour it is on. Four hours a day for a month lands between about $7 and $18 depending on where you live in Canada.

Compare that with raising the central thermostat two degrees for the same month, which heats every room in the house including the empty ones.

Getting more out of one room heater

• Close the door and block the draught underneath it
• Place the heater away from the window wall, pointing into the room
• Set the lowest comfortable temperature — every extra degree costs money all evening
• Use the timer to warm the room before you arrive rather than running it all day
• Keep curtains and furniture at least a metre clear of the grille