With winter coming up, I have two options for home heating.
Central unit
- I can use the central unit and close/open vents throughout the house to heat up only the individual rooms I want. This would heat up rooms very quickly. However, to make this work, the living room with the thermostat will also need to be heated so that the thermostat reads the proper temperature. The living room is by far the largest space at about 2.5 times the size of the largest room.
Oil-filled radiator
- I can use an oil-filled radiator to heat up an individual room. This would be much slower, but I wouldn’t have to heat up the entire living room. However, the oil-filled heater might not be as efficient as the central unit. I don’t know. I plan to rarely heat up the living, no more than once per month.
Edit: The central heating unit is actually a heating kit made up of a few coils that is added to the central a/c.
Edit 2: Where I live, it might freeze once per year over night for a few hours.
Which would be more efficient on the electrical bill, and would t be considerable or negligible?
Unfortunately there are way too many variables just to answer that definitively.
If you put a thousand Watt resistive heater in a room 1,000 watts will generate 1000 watts worth of heat give or take. But if you use a heat pump, 1000 watts of power can be used to move 3,500 Watts worth of heat outside to in. Speaking from a theoretical power concept.
If you’re heating your entire house to 20 or 30° above ambient, you’ll have losses on the roof in every wall, If you’re just eating one room all you have are the losses of that room so insulation becomes a weird thing to calculate.
You can’t just let your pipes freeze if you’re a freezing zone, but generally unless you’re central is super efficient, maintaining a comfortable temperature in one room is more cost-effective, heating one room should cost somewhat less than try to heat the whole house no matter what method you’re using.
At last, a reply that understands the difference between heat pumps vs resistive heating.
You’re right.
If they have a heat pump, it could be cheaper to use that over all.
*Edit: It’s electric resistive heat on a central air system.