Best way to heat a small room.

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micah

New Member
Hearth Supporter
Nov 1, 2007
56
Central Pennsylvania
My wife and I are remodeling a spare room in to a nursery. The room is 8x10 with 8 foot ceiling. It has a big south facing window that gets great sun up to about 1 pm or so. There is no heat vents in the room off of our oil furnace. We dont use our furnace anyway because we heat 100% with wood. The problem is that in the winter the room gets really cold. Starting at around 5 or so you can feel the temp drop. The room is to far from the wood stove to get any noticable heat. I would like to know if there are any other options for me other than baseboard electric. I dont mind baseboard heat because its cheap to buy and easy for me to install. I worry about how hot they get and haveing a toy or something fall on it or even worse the baby or one of the other kids touch it. If I do decide to go with baseboard heat, what size board should I get. Are there any that mount on the ceiling or up higher on a wall.
 
I believe you should be able to get some folding panels to keep babys and pets away from heating elements. I have a portable electric baseboard convection heater that I will use when I want fast heat in my bedroom in the winter when I am heating wood only. It sits on the floor and plugs into a standard outlet.

I have also seen electric space heaters mounted from the ceiling with louvered outputs so you can direct the heat in places. It's a permanent mount but would be out of the way for you.... I'm sure you can probably even hook up a propane fired unit although propane isn't cheap either. I've seen electric units before that are ceiling mount and would work well though I don't remember the brand to recommend but they exist.

Northern Tool Link

The above is one I just quickly found via Google, it's 240v though.


Jay
 
It's a very basic Honeywell thing that looks like an electric baseboard heater... Let me find it..

http://www.kaz.com/kaz/store/product/32da64d6a80a76c2cd9020a63a77f035/

That isn't the exact model as I have, but something similar as it's long, sleek has a metal mesh grate covering the heater element. It's very very quiet in normal operation and has a built in digital thermostat. The metal grate gets hot after awhile at max operation so you'd want to block it off with some kind of barrier.

It is supposed to be placed on the floor for the convection but I don't know if you could simply raise it off the ground when you want to use it. Obviously in such a way that it cannot be tipped over either by the power cord or by the unit themselves and with kids/babys who want to pull on things like power cords, absolutely if you try this route, see if you can install a standard electrical outlet where the unit would be placed. However, it is supposed to be floor mounted.

Jay
 
My girls' bedrooms are at the far end of the house away from the stove. When they go to bed and close the doors the temps drop off pretty quickly. Each room is equipped with a wall mounted cadet style electric wall heater. There is an element inside there but the fan blows air through it and so it isn't a real burn hazard.

They are cheap and a good room heater that can't be knocked over or tripped on. A permanent installation. Individual thermostats on a different wall that are programmable digital units so that the heaters only work at night when they'll be in there with the doors closed. They just plain work.

The heaters aren't on the floor. Mine are actually a couple feet from the floor and more of a curtain hazard than a toy hazard. They only stick out from the wall about 1/2".
 
Another option that I haven't tried but have heard decent things about, are the oil filled electric radiators. Supposedly they put out a good useful heat, but don't get hot enough to be a burn hazard or a toy ignition source.

Another option that we used to use in our summer cottage when I was growing up was a heater with a fan on it... 220vac, grey metal cube about 12" on a side and 18" tall, had a load of heater elements inside with a fan that came on with the heater elements - put out a good bit of heat, but didn't get all that hot on the outside. No idea about brand, etc.

Gooserider
 
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