I think nothing but a right heater when I am in a 6 degrees room.

Last year when we were shopping around Fyshwich, we got so confused about all kinds of heating product range from convections, oil-filled columns, ceramic heaters, fan heaters, panel heaters to some radiation heaters. They all looked same and no particular meanings for us. The old 1000w halogan rediation heater we bought 2 years ago left us not only a cold winter in 2004, but also a kind of “heater phobia” in our hearts. It didn’t work. No, it is even a horrible thing to talk about. I can feel the figure increasing on our energy bill but still got chilblain on feet by sitting in front of it no far than one meter. Besides, the classification of current heating products in the market is a mess. The salesman did suggest potential buyers to choose what they need, but on the other hand, they suggested nothing but a universal purchasing principle. I have never met a salesman who could clearly define each kind of heater or pricisely tell the difference between this one or the other one.

The price is not a problem for people who are desperate to get warm, but even though, getting a useless thing with the cost of a very small money is still frustrating. We want to see some instant change or obvious effect after an exhausted shopping, carrying something back home and plugging it into the power socket, no matter what it’s made of or how much we have spent. We want to see the room tempreture rising, rising and rising until a tropical level. However, with suspicion inside two hurt and cold hearts, ambiguous explanation from the salesmen and little knowledge about heaters, we can hardly put our trust in any products.

Anyway, I had to do a bit research by myself. The finding in the Internet definitely tells me more than what the salesman did. Now at least I am making several things clear:

• To make an effective heating process and break the different tempreture layers in a room, it’s better to use a heater with a fan;
• Oil, metal windings, microtherm board and caramic thing are the intermedia to produce heat; Don’t mix them up with column, panel which are shape of heaters;
• Convection is the principle of air movement that most of heaters use, no matter it’s just a natural course of convection like oil-filled column or a machine-driving convection like a actual convector;
• A single convector without the fan assitance could still be not eenough to heat up a room quickly;
• Ceramic things look like the most efficient way to use energy;
• Heaters with addtional design, such as programmer, timer and thermosat would dramatically increase the price of the products;
• Our old stuff, Halogan rediator is a very poor performance heater in heating the whole room. It can only be used as heating a person who is sitting in front of it;

The conclusion so far we have made: We probabaly would go for a medium size convector with a fan which can be switch off separately.