Edit:
Many thanks for your input everyone!
Just to clarify, I don’t want to take into account the method of generating electricity or shipping it to the home, or the relative costs of gas and electricity. I just want to look at the heater itself! i.e. does 1500W of input into a heater produce 1500W of heat, for example? Or are there other losses I haven’t thought of. Heat pumps are off-topic.
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A friend of mine got one of those new reversible air-conditioner/heater heat pumps. When I first saw it I thought, “how can this be better than a simple electric resistance heater?” After thinking about if for a while it made sense. But resistance electric heaters are simple and foolproof.
Oh god people will fight over shit they don’t know shit about. If the heat comes from electricity it’s 100% efficient it just might not be your preferred delivery system.
To add to the answers, the literal only metric that matters with standard resistive heaters is the wattage. A fancy one might look nicer or have a better fan, but if they’re both 1500W, then the heat they produce is identical. Any claim to the contrary is marketing exploiting the ignorance of their consumers.
And the key take away is don’t pay for the expensive electric heater if all you care about is heat delivered.
When talking about the efficiency of anything you have to be a little more specific. For example electric heaters are 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat. 1500w of electricity will give you 1500w of heat. However heat pumps can turn 1500w of electricity into almost 4500w of heat by moving it from outdoors to indoors. But this depends on the temperature differential between the two. At a high enough temp difference (example: -15 outdoor/68indoor) your heat pump can actually use more watts of electricity than it can move in heat. And you need back up electric heating.
So when you talk about efficiency you have to specify at doing what. If you have two 1500w electric heaters and 1 with a fan, both will turn 1500w of electricity into 1500w of heat. But the one with a fan would more efficiently heat a room because of the more even temp you would have throughout the room.
Maybe there is an accidental equivocation of the word “efficient” happening.
For us laypeople, we want to know how much useful heat some appliance is going to produce for a given amount of electricity that we have to pay for. That’s the “efficiency” for us.
I’d bet that my oil-filler heater makes the room comfortable and keeps it near the same temp for less electricity cost overall than a cheaper toaster-like heater.
Not entirely. Some of that power is converted into light. Which is an inefficiency because its supposed to be turned into heat.
Same thing with a lightbulb. Most of its power is converted to light but some is converted into heat. And thats why kids used to cook food with lightbulb ovens.
No. Some of the heater’s energy is converted into to sound or light which does not directly heat the intended space.
Well, yes and no. Since their goal is to create heat, they do tend to be more efficient, but they waste energy in other ways, namely light.
I think it isn’t 100% efficient. There is loss of energy through heat through wires which might be at unwanted places.
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