The quiet, silent type
Electric panel heaters are unobtrusive, economical and highly functional. They are silent, efficient, versatile and good-looking and there is no fan to blow dust around, which makes them ideal for asthma sufferers. They are also a great choice for bedrooms and bathrooms. But here’s something you probably didn’t know: most brands of panel heaters have the capacity to be networked together. It’s as simple as allocating one of your panels as the master and the others its slaves. For example, the panel heater you choose to be the master may be in your bedroom or kitchen. The other heaters - ‘the slaves’ - may be in children’s bedrooms, a study, bathroom or hallway.

Masterful touch
You can then control all heaters from the one heater by way of a master control. It sounds big but the control devices we looked at were actually quite small and simply clicked into a pre-allocated space in the back of the heater. With some brands this control device doesn’t even need wiring - the instructional signals are sent via an inbuilt radio transmitter (which we think is pretty clever). For a small capital outlay you can effectively create an intelligent, centralised heating system for the rest of your home.

What is it?
The master control device is basically a plug-in 24-hour digital timer that controls every heater in the house. You can program individual heaters to turn on and off at different times of the day or night. This is a particularly useful, and very efficient, way of warming up bedrooms when you most need them to be warm. For example, you can set your panel heater to the “comfort” setting in the evening an hour or two before you usually go to bed. Your bedroom will then be toasty warm when you retire. It can be programmed to go into ‘economy’ mode while you sleep and then go into ‘comfort’ mode just before you get up so that the bedroom is nice and warm again when you get up - no dressing gown required!
Panel heaters come in various shapes and sizes to suit all situations - low, medium and tall. You can get convection/radiant models - for a “soft”, ambient heat - or radiant models that add an element of directional heat that you can feel.

Pros
Excellent for asthma and allergy sufferers - no fans therefore does not blow dust around.
Practically maintenance-free because of no moving parts.
Totally silent operation.
Relatively inexpensive to run when connected to the Aurora Heating Discount.
Easy to install, just about anywhere.
Excellent for bedrooms and hallways to take chill out of the air.
Added convenience when timers are installed.

Cons
Not usually practical as a stand alone heater for a living area, unless the living area is quite small. For larger areas, more than one panel would be needed which could be detrimental if limited for wall space.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!