Seconded. Really cheap electric heaters may be noisy, dangerous, and have fans that are too small to spread the heat around optimally, but they're all equally efficient.
If you're GOING to use electric heat, the Krystal seems like it might be a bit more comfortable than the $20 heater since it has a larger heat exchanger/fan so the air doesn't get "cooked" but I have no idea how they can claim higher efficiency or less effect on humidity.
Heaters don't remove humidity from the air, they just raise the temperature which allows the air to hold more water, reducing the RELATIVE humidity. Houses get dry in the winter because the outside air is cold and dry to begin with, not because of your heating system.
Honestly, there is no free lunch with home heating. Your options are basically :
- insulate and close off drafts (blowing insulation into the attic between the roof joists makes a big difference if this isn't already done)
- spot heating or playing with HVAC to mostly heat the rooms you are actually in, letting the others get a bit colder
- looking into whatever fuel is cheap in your area and is likely to stay cheap for a while -- occasionally this includes electricity, but more commonly something like wood or even corn
If your propane heat isn't real efficient, look into improving that, but most propane heaters are pretty good these days.
Bottom line; unless electricity is real cheap in your area this doesn't seem like a good use of $$. Any "savings" would come from using electricity rather than propane, ie if propane prices had gone up much more than electricity prices, to the point that electricity was now cheaper per BTU than propane. It's possible, but I doubt it.
Note that (a) the Krystal brochure uses .08/KWH in their example but AFAIK we're all paying almost twice that once you include distribution costs, and (b) nearly all of the testimonials talked about how much their GAS costs had gone down, not how much their TOTAL utilities had gone down.
If you happened to live in an area where electricity was really cheap at certain times of the day then going with electric heat might make sense for you -- even so, you would only want to consider that Krystal furnace if you were confident that you would get your money's worth in ways other than efficiency. I'm not saying it *is* quieter or more comfortable, just that it *might* be.
EDIT -- one last point; depending on how cold it gets in your area it's possible that an electric heat pump might work for you, but California has a huge range of climates so it's hard to tell without knowing your specifics. Heat pumps are very efficient when it is only "cool" out, but when it gets real cold the heat pump turns off and the system falls back to electric heat.
Last edited by bridgman; 11/05/06 04:54 PM.
