What is the best and safest energy efficient portable heater for a small/medium sized room?
Would be great if on wheels as it is for an elderly woman that lives alone with no family members close.
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Welcome to the Community, @chloebree!
I’d consider a column heater, especially one with a built-in fan that can overcome the main disadvantage of column heaters - that they’re slow to heat an area from cold. The fan can help spread the heat around the room more efficiently than with just convection. This type of heater is always on wheels, so it’d be easy for an elderly person to move it around as required.
See this CHOICE article for detailed advice about and the pros and cons of the different types of heaters:
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The requirement to be small and portable leaves out any kind of heat pump/aircon which are the most efficient by far. This leaves you with resistive electric heaters, that work by converting electricity directly into heat energy, these have various formats like radiative (bar), fan or oil.
Their efficiency in converting electric power is all very close to the same but some use fans to distribute the warm air and some don’t. The result is that (for the same power output) they cost very much the same to run per hour. It is a matter of taste whether one wants to sit in front of it or heat the whole room. The price of buying these various styles is very variable.
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Oil heaters eat electricity, so do fan heaters, and thus, any heater which has both is going to wreak havoc on the budget. I have various oil heaters (Delonghi) and radiant (Heller and some other no-name) and find the cheapie bar heaters much easier to manage on a budget. I only have one on, usually at its lowest setting, for a while in the morning, and then later in the evening for 3 hours or so before heading to bed.
The issue I had with the oil heaters was that I would leave them on all winter. Whereas with radiant heaters, I can see they need turning off when I leave the house or go to bed etc. Its saved me hundreds of $$$
