Does Using A Space Heater Save Money

Space heaters can save you money in a handful of different ways, even if you already have a furnace or a fireplace or other ways to heat your home. How could that possibly be true? Well, here's the deal…

Space heaters work for heating up a smaller, more concentrated area of your home. A furnace heats up the entire home. A furnace is important in the dead of winter because it can keep your whole house at a base temperature, which can prevent your pipes from freezing. The problem is this: Running the heater on a higher setting when you want to be cozy is EXPENSIVE.

Instead, you can use your furnace to make sure that your whole home is at a non-freezing temperature, and then run a space heater in whichever room you're spending time in. If you're in your living room or bedroom, there's no sense in spending money keeping the laundry room or the kitchen cozy warm, right?

Here at Warmest, we're all about helping you stay cozy, so we've put together the following information to help you stay warm without breaking the bank. Some of the solutions will make perfect sense, some are a little more surprising, but all of this information can help you save money on heating with or without a space heater.

Space heaters are more expensive to run if you were trying to heat an entire house with them, but when you use them strategically instead of spending money to heat your entire house using a furnace, they can actually be more economical as part of a bigger warmth-strategy for your home.

Here's How Space Heaters Save You Money

If you tried to use space heaters to heat your entire home, it would cost a lot more than using a furnace – but using just one space heater to get one area of your home extra warm and cozy is a lot cheaper than trying to use your furnace for that.

You can purchase the best space heaters for relatively inexpensive compared to the money you'll save using a simple home heating stratgy outlined above (use furnace to keep home relatively warm, use space heaters where you spend the most time to stay the warmest in those areas.)

You shouldn't leave the heater unattended, so it's not a bad idea to get a portable one if you plan to bring it from room to room. They're all relatively portable, but ones that are a bit smaller or have a convenient handle are going to be better for moving around if you take it with you.

Saving Money on Heating

Another way to save money on heating is just to put on an extra layer of clothes. This can make a surprising difference in your winter heating bills. Between trying to bundle up a bit more, and not cranking the furnace on full blast and using portable heaters instead, you won't have to dread your electricity bills quite as much.

Using a space heater will lower your heating bills as long as you're smart about it, and don't rely on it as the only way to heat your entire home. These types of heaters are less efficient, but they're more specific in the area they heat, which is how they can save you money despite technically being more expensive to operate.

Here's what BuckeyeHeat had to say about it:

Most space heaters have multiple settings controlled by a thermostat. At full power, many small space heaters use 1,500 W per hour and may use as little as 300 W an hour when running on low. How you set the thermostat can have an impact on whether using a space heater will save you money on your energy bills.

How Much Money Can You Save Using a Space Heater?

How much money can you save by using a space heater in addition to your furnace? Here's a neat trick... — How much money can you save by using a space heater in addition to your furnace? Here's a neat trick…

Start by taking the wattage of the heater you're planning to use, which is often determined by how large of a room you'll be heating. So, really, start by picking a room, estimate how large it is, find a heater meant for that size of room, check the wattage of that heater, THEN…

Multiply the wattage of the heater by the number of hours you'll be using it each day to figure out how much electricity it'll use in an average day. Keep in mind these aren't meant to run around the clock.
Take a look at your electricity bill to see how much you pay per kilowatt per hour, and multiple that by the average number of hours you would use the heater each day.
Multiple this number by 30 to figure out your average monthly usage.
Divide this number by 1000 to find out how much it'll cost you, each month, to run your heater.

You can also figure out the cost of running your furnace in a similar fashion, keeping in mind that you can set your furnace lower when you're using a portable heater, so you'll be saving a lot of money on reduced furnace use.

Overall, it's a net gain, so if you can run your furnace a bit lower, bundle up a bit more, and also use a space heater to fill in the blanks, you can definitely save money.

Read this before using a propane space heater indoors, please.

Staying warm is important when it's cold outside, but so is protecting your budget! Most important, though, is staying safe. Whenever you're dealing with high levels of electricity and heat, safety needs to be at the forefront.