Cheapest way to heat a small bedroom?

[FayeGovan]

Ds's bedroom is small but at the back of the house and it gets colder than everywhere else. We are in west of Scotland and its cold and damp all bloody winter. Hes already complaining how cold it feels and i cant afford the heating on yet.

Id like a small heater he could use to heat the room up a bit and take the chill off it. Hes grown up he isnt a fire risk he can turn it off himself.

Any ideas please?

No one?

I use oil filled radiators to take the chill off in my sons room. Doesn't heat it up very quickly but if left on and door shut it is enough and I believe very cheap to run. Think the box said 1-2p an hour when I bought it (although obviously more now🙄). I also bought him a fake oodie last Xmas, cost about £20, he's hardly worn it yet as 'too warm' but sure he'll be using it this winter.

Ceramic heater, can be wall mounted or free standing and they cost pennies to run.

Small oil heater or infrared red heater. The latter is more expensive outlay but will cost less in electricity.

if the already heating in there maybe the cheap fan heater. A quick blast of heat would boost the heating already there

Genuine question: are oil filled radiators really low cost?

I looked and they were all around 1000 watts or 1kwh per hour. At current prices, that's about 45p an hour - soon to be about 80p per hour. If it's on for 3 hours a day, that's about £75 a month over this winter.

I'm checking my maths, because I thought about one for my office but am not sure it's really the cheapest option?

Draft pillows
Material blinds and curtains
Hot water bottle
Ensure windows are sealed
Open curtains on warmer days to let the heat in
If he likes tea or coffee have a kettle in the room so when he makes one that wakes the room up( that's what we did in uni)
Heated blanket
Extra blankets
Carpet and or warm rugs if you haven't already
Cover unused electrical outlets to stop breezes
Insulate attic
Heat reflectors

Any electric heater will cost the same to run. Oil filled ones take longer to heat up but stay warmer. A 1kw heater will use 1kw of electricity per hour so what ever your kwh rate is. In a small room a 1kw heater should be fine. Curtains closed (thick ones) and door shut and the heat will stay in the room. You wont need it on for long to warm the room. Warm clothing, especially socks, no sitting in t shirts with the heating on. Oil filled would probably be safer as there is no risk to covering the element or it getting dusty inside. They come with timers but sometimes the timers make an annoying clicking sound.

My DD has an attic bedroom with uninsulated roof and three exposed sides! It's freezing. I've offered her the guest room which is warmer but she likes the quirkiness of her too. Anyway, she has an oil filled electric radiator which is plugged in through a timer (because she would forget to switch it off). It does make it toasty.

Quirkiness of her room

We use an oil filled rad to heat up our bedroom just before bed, we do have heating but room is always freezing. We only need to put it on for an hour before bed and it makes the room toast.

Does anyone know how much energy oil radiators use at different settings? Our 1.5kw oil rad has 3 temp settings and I am assuming the highest setting is the one with 1.5 kW energy input/output. Lowest temp setting puts out a lot less heat, wonder what kW that will be? I have looked at the manual but did not find this info. It would be useful though as we never use ours on highest setting.

I'd assume it's in 500w increments.

I have a 1500w oil filled radiator in my garden office. No idea on running costs but even when it's snowing outside I'd say it only goes on full blast for the first hour and after that it stops/starts (it has a thermostat) and is off more than on.

Would a hot water bottle help? Getting into a warm bed is nicer than getting into a cold bed

Electric throw on the bed or electric blanket

It will cost 1.5 times your cost per kwh of electricity. My electricity is 28p per kwh so it would cost me 42p an hour to run it on full power.

Oil radiators used to be cheap to run but not any more.
I left one on, only on low, for 3 weeks last December in my unheated conservatory, it doubled my electric bill for that month!

Ditto heated airers, I worked out that if DD leaves hers on for 24 hrs ( she does this a lot 🙄) it will cost £4 when rates go up in October. As she has 4/5 washes a week that’s potentially £20 😱 I’ve told her to put a sheet or duvet cover over the airer and a radiator instead which will have a similar effect.

I looked into buying a heat pump dryer but you can’t use them in an unheated garage.

A decent dehumidifier. The Meaco Arete models are excellent best in class.

Why? Firstly, it will make the air more comfortable by removing excess moisture, thus helping the sensation of cold be removed by making the air dry and less likely to leach heat from a warm body.

Secondly, it's basically a heat pump. A model running at 250 W or so will produce more heat output (some on the order of 50% or more) than the input power load. A 1 kW electric radiator produces 1 kW of heat energy for every 1 kW of electrical. A heat pump with a coefficient of performance of 1.5, like a basic dehumidifier, will produce 375 W of heat output due to the latent heat of vaporisation. So long as you empty the cold condensate from the tank and pour it down the drain (or in your garden, we are in drought) then you're providing supplemental heat to a localised area by extracting the heat energy from ambient water vapour and pumping it as warm air into the room.

Gas is much cheaper than electricity. So it would porbably be cheaper to turn on the heating and turn off the radiators in the rooms that don't need heating currently.

This basically. I looked into the same thing last winter and if you've got central heating, it's cheapest to use that and hear the house rather than use an alternative source to try and get one room.

I decided to wear more clothes, put up thermal curtains and put bubble wrap on the windows (cuts up to 50% of the heat loss). I put the heating on when the rest of the house is cold. If it's a bedroom, I've read that electric blankets are supposedly cheap to run, but I've not checked that myself.

Update on this. I've now ordered a couple of electric throws. They cost £30 each and will cost ~3.5p an hour to run. We're going to use those when we want to be in the colder areas of the house. They apparently work really well and will work out cheaper than the heating.

Where from puddles?

The one I got was from www.futuradirect.co.uk/collections/electric-heated-throws-and-blankets/products/cozytek-luxurious-electric-heated-throw-supersize-160-x-120cm-soft-fleece-navy-blue-throw-blanket-large-heated-electric-blanket-overblanket-with-timer-9-control-heat-settings It was linked from hotdealsuk where people were rating it highly.