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Out of the box, the panel heater can either be wall-mounted or it can have feet screwed into place so that it can be free-standing. With the latter, the feet are fiddly to screw into place and the instruction manual doesn’t tell you which way round they should go; it just says that if the heater is tilting, you’ve got them on incorrectly. There’s no fan in this model, but warm air rising causes air movement, which I measured at 0.52m/s. It’s enough of a breeze to gently warm a room through, even if it’s not immediately felt in the way that a fan heater’s directional blast is. The Princess is a great option that won’t break the bank – and, at just 350 watts, it’s cheap to run, too. If you’ve got a cold room that needs a bit of a boost, the Princess Glass Smart Panel Heater is a smart way of adding comfort. Wall-mountable or freestanding, this plug-in heater has smart controls so that you can remote control it from your phone or use your voice. We then test the heaters in various rooms and locations around our home – a home office, a living room and a cold, poorly insulated room. For the panel and bar heaters, we put them behind a work desk to see how well they warm the legs and waist area. We then move the products to a typical sitting room position – the panels are positioned a couple of metres from our seating position, and we time how long it took for the infrared rays to reach us. We also time how long it takes for the heaters to reach full heating capacity. Finally, we also test each unit in a small but very cold room to see how effective they are at projecting heat across an exceedingly cold environment.
Infrared bar heaters are another popular choice. These types are also usually mounted to a wall or skirting board area, but they’re not the most attractive. Finally, there’s the halogen or carbon option most often used for outdoor patio heating. These types of heaters are extremely efficient at producing direct heat, but the tubes do get extremely hot, so you will need to give thought to where you place them. Are infrared heaters energy-efficient?
Use it in conjunction with the Princess app and you can control it from wherever you are, or use the built-in thermostat and the tiny onboard LCD temperature screen to set the best temperature for your room. This is a silent heater, apart from a beep whenever you change its target temperature. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to switch this off, but otherwise it should be easy to live with. That’s particularly true if you’re mounting it on a wall: it only stands about five centimetres proud, so it takes up little of your living space. Princess doesn’t mention or recommend it, but in theory it would be possible to mount this panel on a ceiling and have it still be effective. That’s the case for the Aeno Premium Eco Smart Heater; just make sure that ceiling mounting is done carefully.
As everyone’s homes and electricity usage are different, this is a hard question to answer definitively. So, we turned to Joanna O’Loan, the Energy Saving Trust’s Knowledge Manager, for an expert opinion. If you need to use an electric heater, place it in the part of the room you want to warm, a safe distance from you and any furniture. Use the heater’s thermostat and timer to avoid using more energy than you need.” However, it should be noted that very few electric heating systems are capable of beating the lower running costs of heating a whole home using a gas central heating system, so we’re still quite some time away from discovering the Holy Grail. Can you really feel the warmth emitted by an infrared heater? This means removing and refitting two screws, but on my sample one of them was seized – I stripped the head trying to remove it, and ultimately had to make do with simply resting the heater in one of the feet. There’s no handle to help move it around, although this is a light heater and my sample never got too hot to touch during use.Infrared heaters are different to all the other models on our list, as they radiate heat, rather than circulating it. This means they won’t heat a whole room in quite the same way, but if they’re positioned near you, they should make you nice and toasty. This was reinforced when we tested the Princess model; while the overall room temperature was lower than you’d find using a convection heater, it still rose after some use. And our expert found that when sat in front of it, they were suitably warm within just ten minutes, feeling the benefits even from 1.5 meters away. To find the best electric heater, our experts start by measuring their power consumption. They run each heater for an hour on its highest and lowest setting and calculate how much it costs for that period. On the other hand, halogen-equipped infrared heaters are much better at producing noticeable warmth almost immediately, since the halogen tubes glow red hot the moment you turn them on. This is the reason halogen is one of the most popular choices for patio heating. How we test infrared heaters With the Princess Glass Smart Panel Heater on maximum setting, I measured the middle of the panel at 58C and the top at 78C, with the controls sub 25C. That’s good, as you won’t burn yourself if you need to adjust the temperature and don’t want to use the app. Infrared heaters made with marble are fast gaining popularity, because of this material’s remarkable heat-retaining and distribution properties, along with the ability to remain warm for quite a while after being turned off. Some portable, stand-mounted models, such as the Klarstein HeatPal we review below, use raw, unpolished marble to help radiate the heat generated by the internal coil, while companies such as Elith produce beautifully polished slabs of high-quality marble with infrared coils behind them. Polished marble panel heaters aren’t cheap to buy or install, but they’re unquestionably the most elegant way to heat a home.
The Princess Smart Panel Heater has a luxurious appearance because of the glass housing and the LED indicators. Via the display or the app on your smartphone you can choose two different heating settings and set the timer. With the timer you can decide how long you want the heater to be on for and when it automatically shuts off. The panel heater has an adjustable thermostat and can heat from from 15⁰ to 35⁰.Safety is paramount when it comes to using heated products. All the heaters we’ve featured below either have timers or auto cut-off features, which will turn them off if they get too hot. We’ve also highlighted whether they have handles, as this impacts their portability – many don’t, meaning you'll have to wait until they’ve cooled down before you can safely move them.
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