Oscillating Heater
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What's the best heater for a basement family room during the off-season?
The room is 11'x22', there is no door on the room. What's the best mini heater? (We have forced air oil heating for our entire house in winter. Want a heater for when we don't have our furnace on in the fall and spring.)
Halogen
Halogen oscillating heater
Oscillating ceramic heater
Fan heater
Oil filled heater
Plug-in baseboard heater
You should first calculate how much heat you need for the room. A rule of thumb for a room with 8 foot ceilings is to use 7.5 watts/square foot for a well insulated room, 10 watss/square foot for an average insulated room and 12.5 watts/square foot for a poorly insulated room. For higher ceilings add 25% more heat for every 2 feet of additional height. Assuming your basement has 8 foot ceilings and poor insulation you would need about 3025 watts of heat supply. For taller ceilings you would need more heat.
Next, since it's a family room and you may have a home theater system or at least TV and Stereo then you probably don't want to have something that would make much noise like the heaters with fan and oscillating motors. The halogen heaters rely on radiant heat transfer and work best when they can be close to the person and aren't as good for whole room use. Electric baseboard heaters warm up quickly, but also cool down quickly. The oil filled heaters warm up more slowly, but once they heat up they cool down more slowly too so they tend to have less extreme temperature swings than the electric element heaters.
So in that case I think the best choice would be 2 or 3 of the 1500 watt oil filled heaters for quiet and uniform heating. For quicker heat up then use an oil filled heater with 2 electric baseboard heaters. I have also seen a heater by Holmes called a Micathermic heater that warms up quickly and is very quiet, but I don't know how much thermal mass it has.
If it's not too late to install it, then radiant heat in the floor would be the best for the basement room. Electric mesh rolls can be imbedded in a 1/8 inch thick layer of thinset concrete. This would cost about $2500 or so to install.
Oscillating Reflective Heater
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