Before It Gets Much Colder in Chicago...

A few weeks back the first blast of cold started rolling over the city from Lake Michigan, and our apartment wasn't exactly comfortable.  I love Chicago and all, but man, I didn't expect the freeze this early in the year.  Winter is still a good month away. I also now regret moving into a place without heat included in the rent (which I can only expect would cost a large fortune here, paying the small fortune that I do now).  So we sought out and bought a heater.

We've only got the two large rooms to deal with, so we wanted something we could move back and forth fairly easily.  The hope was that this lightweight a product would also, you know, work to heat the place efficiently, and quickly. 

What we got was the Honeywell Oil Filled Electric Radiator Heater, and it seems we lucked out.  It was only about $60 at Target, and it has proven very strong across the board thus far.  We haven't gotten into the super Chicago cold yet, but I'm pretty confident this heater will continue to function well.  We've been running it about 12 hours a day for a few weeks now, and we've had no real problems.

The unit only requires connecting the wheels out of the box, which is beyond easy and takes a minute.  The front panel has the power button, and three switches to control the power usage (which seems to only regulate how fast it heats up), a timer (if you want it to shut off by itself), and a temperature control (which, in theory, will be how warm your rooms will be).

After you turn it on, you can choose between the temperature displaying in Celsius or Fahrenheit.  Then, you pick your desired temperature, and it subsequently shows you the current room temperature.  What I've found is if you set the temperature higher (it goes up to 85), you'll get about 90% of your wish.  Mostly we've been aiming for 72 degrees, so we're setting it five or six degrees north of that.  I'm not sure if this is a design flaw, or a fault of our drafty windows, but it's the same in both rooms.

The power designation doesn't seem to have a serious effect on your comfort either.  If you put it on the high, three-bar setting (1500 watts), and wait for it to get up near your desired temperature, you can then roll it back down to the two or one-bar settings (900 and 600, respectively), and it will stay warm.  The temperature might dip a bit at first, but it will catch up shortly.  Even running on the high power, it's going to take a good half an hour to drastically change the temperature (but we've been starting in the mid 50s, looking to get 20 degrees warmer, so that may factor in).

It's only about twenty five pounds, and it rolls very easily.  Plus, it has a plastic handle on the front of the unit so you can move it while it's on without burning yourself, as most of the rest of it is pretty hot, and as expected, takes some time to cool down.  We're moving it from one room to the next with no real break, so this is handy.  We do have to unplug it between rooms, as the cord is pretty short, and you really shouldn't plug a heater into an extension cord.

So it's portable and works to heat fairly accurately, but the best thing might be the quiet.  You really can't hear it running at all.  It's amazing.  I'm someone who needs some noise to sleep, so when we got it I figured I could forgo my winter humidifier routine.  Nope, this thing doesn't make a peep.  I'd call it a drawback, but only because I was expecting differently.

Now, it's essentially an exposed radiator that gets hot to the touch, and you're not supposed to have anything around it in a radius of a couple feet, so this clearly won't be ideal for everyone.  If you have pets or small children this could serve as an excellent lesson in what doctor's bills will cost for them, so you might want to look elsewhere.  If you don't have the open space to accommodate it you may want to choose a number of smaller ceramic heaters instead.  But if you've already taken these limitations into account, really, this heater works just about perfectly.  It has a few drawbacks, such as the temperature settings inaccuracies and the general hazard it represents, but function-wise it's a wonder.