I’m looking for an electric heater for my office. Ideally it’d be really quiet. The office is well insulated, so it doesn’t need to get too hot.
Can you recommend a brand and model?
Agreed with the other comment, the sealed oil radiator heaters are near silent (no fan) and have no trouble heating up a small/mid sized room after some time. The newer ones nowadays have a thermostat so you can set the temperature to something specific & have it heat up to that temperature.
Not a specific brand but style of electric heater. I prefer the oil filled ones. They make zero noise and safer because they don’t have an exposed heating element that can catch things on fire by coming in contact. The one have has a temperature setting and a clock that can be programmed to turn itself on/off at designated times. Cons are they take a while to heat up and are a bit larger. Mine is tall and thin, looks a bit like a boiler radiator. The big hardware chain stores sell them, I’d expect to pay around $100.
Looked it up on home depot website. They have a lot to pick from. Some are cheaper but with less features https://www.homedepot.com/p/NewAir-Portable-400-Watt-Electric-Oil-Filled-Silent-Slim-Fit-Design-Under-Desk-Heater-with-Energy-Efficient-Operation-White-AH-400/205588528
This. They’re surprisingly energy efficient, and while they take a bit to heat up, once they get going they really radiate. I have a small one, and it gets me through the coldest days of winter without needing to turn on the built-in heaters in my apartment.
Bonus is that my cat loooves it. He posts up right next to it and is in cozy heaven.
They are no more efficient than exposed element heaters.
Every electric heater is 100% efficient. In fact heaters are the only things that can be that efficient
Fun fact: heat pumps are more than 100% efficient. In heaters, 100% is trash.
Cool. Heat pumps are better for most use cases.
That looks great! I like that it doesn’t have a fan. Thanks for the link.
Candles.
Class up the working environment with a room-warming candelabra.
We’re gonna party like it’s 1699!
Verily. Commence the merriment aſ if we were foolſ!
If you mostly care about sound, there are some that don’t have a fan.
One option is a fanless convection heater, like the oil heater Hikermick recommended. These things just use passive convention to transfer heat, so they don’t have moving parts. You might hear a few sounds from the metal as the thing heats up and cools down, or maybe the relay clicking on and off occasionally to regulate the temperature, but not aside from that.
They take a long time to come up to temperature, so they aren’t ideal if you regularly go in and out of the room, but they work fine for keeping a place at a more-or-less constant temperature.
Another is a radiant heater. These are basically big infrared spotlights, heat lamps. At least some can make a bit of sound when heating up – I had one that did this, and another that was fully silent.
These are good at heating up a particular location, whatever they’re aimed at, quickly, so they’re good if you just want to heat something in the room. You can aim it at yourself, have the heat immediately affect you; I’ve seen them recommended for things like bathrooms for this reason.
Unlike oil heaters, these will emit some visible light, so they aren’t ideal if you want the room to be fully dark (e.g. I don’t know if you watch movies in your office or something, but it’ll light the room at least somewhat).
I didn’t realize there were fanless options. I’ll take a look at those.
Infrared spotlights sound like they’d get really hot, but I’ll check that out too.
Thanks!
Project Farm tested a bunch of them and used a decibel meter, results at 7:04-7:30
I like empirical testing! Thanks!
