Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Here's a review from the perspective of having used one of these for an entire winter. I bought one of these a year ago so we could set our natural gas heat on a very low temprature at night during the winter and still keep the master bedroom warm. Here are my observations. 1. It performed flawlessly and was so quiet we wouldn't even know it was there. 2. The timer is what sold me on the unit. 24 hours divided into small time intervals which may each be turned on or off give huge flexibility in when this heater runs and doesn't. It's on automatically only when you want it on. 3. The heat comes out the top. The sides stay very "cool" for a heater. I can put may hands on the sides for about a half a second, which means that touching the heater accidently on the sides probably won't cause a burn. It really seems to be built with safety in mind. 4. I would, of course, still follow the directions with regard to how close it is placed to other objects. As an additional safety measure, I bought a large, thick ceramic tile to put on the carpet, and then I put the heater on the tile. 5. There is an oily smell that seems to come from the heater when it is new out of the box and after being turned on for the first time after being in storage for the summer. When we first activated ours two nights ago we smelled it, but tonight not so much. 6. Some seem to have had build quality issues and I can't comment on that because we seem to have received a good one. 7. I live in the Pacific Northwest where the winter temperatures rarely get below 30 degrees. I know in some places it gets way colder than that, and I have no idea how well this heater would keep you warm under those circumstances. 8. Right now we're running it in the family room to see if we can leave the electric baseboard heaters off for the winter. Of course, if this experiment succeeds, we'll have to buy another one of these heaters for the bedroom. 9. I have two small children, and once I've explained to them that they need to stay away from it, I have no safety worries for them. So far, this is far and away the safest, quietest, and most effective space heater I've ever owned. For me, it sure beats a box with glowing orange heating elements and a fan! Postscript: I bought a second one. When you are unpacking it, beware that there may be bits of styrofoam down in the heater. Look for those and get them out of there before you power it on for the first time. That may save some you some stinky fumes, but still follow the directions and let it run on full power with a lot of ventilation for at least two hours or more. I bought a second unit and ran it for three hours with the window open. Second Postscript: Well, we bought a second one to see if it was more efficient than the baseboard heaters in our family room. We turned the baseboards off and ran this heater using the timer to have it be on about six out of every twenty four hours. Surprisingly, our electric bill this December was significantly higher than last December, and this is about the only thing different about our energy consumption. So, that experiment seemed to have failed, and then the timer on the second heater failed only ten weeks after we purchased it, so I took it back to where I bought it and decided to take a credit instead of a replacemet. I still love having the one in the bedroom for those cold winter nights though.