Challenge 2KW Electric Convector Heater with Timer & 3 Heat Settings (A Grade)

Product Information

Portable electric heaters use electricity, which costs 27.35p/kWh under the current energy price cap. Depending on how effective the heater is, they can take anything from 30 minutes to an hour to notably raise the temperature of a medium-sized room, so if you're only planning on using it until the room gets up to temperature, it will likely cost you between 28 and 55p. We buy all the electric heaters we test. We put the bestselling heaters from popular UK retailers through these tests: Heating speed, evenness, and accuracy Looking for heating solutions like electric heaters and electric radiators? You’ve come to the right place. Our range of convector heaters are a great choice when it comes to providing some additional heat in your home. Put them on for a few hours at a time to help heat up an entire room, and with a timer and thermostat, you've got complete control. And to make your radiators seamlessly merge with your home’s décor, we’ve also got radiator covers in a wide variety of colours so you can heat up your space without compromising on style. Adjustable thermostat Using this function, a portable heater will heat the room and when the desired temperature is reached, it will try to maintain the room at that temperature. Most of the cheaper, simpler heaters we tested have a dial thermostat that doesn't let you choose specific temperatures in °C. You'll likely need to buy a more expensive model for that. Our tests also found that they're rarely 100% accurate and will probably think the room is a couple of °C warmer or cooler than it is.

How important these features are is down to personal preference. If all you want is something to keep you warm when there's a nip in the air, and you don't care about how it looks or require the ability to control it at a distance, a decent budget electric heater should be perfectly adequate. It is also very important that you work out just how much heat is required to warm the size of room to a comfortable temperature. For example, if a room requires 4kw of heat input to warm it to 21c, then you are unlikely to be able to heat it adequately by using a single 2kw or 3kw convector heater. To produce the 4kw required to heat the room comfortably, you would be advised to use (2x) 2kw convector heaters which would work out very expensive. (This calculation doesn’t apply to Halogen Heaters as they are not warming the entire room).Remember that 1000 watts can also be expressed as 1kw and 2000 watts = 2kw and 3000 watts = 3kw. Fractions of this can also be represented by using a decimal place, and so a 2500 watt convector heater may also be referred to as using 2.5kw, a 2400 watt heater as 2.4kw etc. Pinning down an exact comparison of how much central heating and electric heaters cost to run is nigh-on impossible, as the factors below are just some of the variables that play a part: As you can see Convector Heaters, Electric Fires and Fan Heaters can be extremely costly to run and as of 2023 Electricity is the most expensive form of heating, more so if the room or property you are heating is poorly insulated. If you are intending to stay in the property for a long time, then consider installing Storage Heaters which use cheaper off peak Electricity for your room heating.

Not many of them have specific temperatures in degrees °C, though, so rather than programming specific temperatures on the thermostat you'll need to experiment with your heater's settings and find the coolest setting that still gives you the warmth you're looking for. As you can imagine, pricing is one of the most important factors of any purchasing decision. We can find the perfect product for our needs, that fits the brief in every single way. But if it doesn’t fit our budgets, we simply can’t (or at least shouldn’t) buy it. We assess how easily each electric heater can be set up and how easily understandable the controls and settings are. We used any handles to lift the heater and move it around. While some heaters can be used straight out of the box, others have complicated program and timer settings. It is false economy to try and save money by using a smaller heater than the room size calculator advises. By trying to heat a room whose size requires 4kw of heat by using a 2kw convector will result in the room constantly feeling cold, taking many hours to reach a comfortable temperature and mean that the room probably never gets warm enough to switch off the thermostat, so the heater uses power continuously. In this situation you would be much better off using Halogen Heaters for personal comfort.If the brand you buy is important to you, our best advice is to spend some time writing up your own list of ideal brands. That way when you come to the point where you’re comparing product options you can filter to only show the products from brands in your list. The example above uses UK Sterling for the Electricity cost, but this can easily be substituted with other currencies, such as U.S Cents as the calculation method is exactly the same. This story was first published on 7 October 2021 and is updated regularly to reflect new heaters we've tested as well as changing prices and availability of heaters. We're not able to show every retailer and cheaper prices may be available. Prices and availability last updated 26 October 2023. Tagged as: They tend to be cheap to run, but some can be really slow to heat up. Most oil-filled heaters are also fairly heavy and cumbersome, so look out for models that come with wheels. This cycling of the heater, means that once the room has warmed up to the desired temperature, the heater stops consuming Electricity and so saves money. How often the heater switches off, depends on a number of factors such as the outside temperature, the size of the room, how well insulated the room / building is and of course how high the thermostat is set. The more heat that is lost through the fabric of the building the more heat the convector heater will have to produce to replace it and the ‘on’ periods will be far longer, and the running costs, much higher.

In a well insulated room, and using a convector heater with a built in thermostat, you could reasonably deduct 15% – 20% from any cost figures that you have worked out in the maths formula above to allow diversity for the heater switching on and off. However in a poorly insulated building this saving may only be 5%, assuming it reaches the desired temperature on the thermostat at all.

The brand of product you buy can vary in importance, from person to person. Some people will of course be much more particular about the brands they will use. Whilst others aren’t interested in the brand and are more interested in the overall quality or price of the product itself. Thankfully Challenge is a brand that many customers have grown to love over the years and is very popular for items in the Heaters and radiators category. Next up is material. Read through the product description for Challenge 2kW Convector Heater to get an understanding of the materials the product is made from. Some materials will obviously be known for delivering better quality item than others. You might also have decided that you’ll only accept a product made from a particular material. On average, most electric heaters run at a maximum output of 2kW. In other words: if you run your 2kW electric heater at full blast for one hour, you'll be paying around 55p. For just half an hour, it'll cost you around 27p. One unit of Electricity is consumed for every 1000 watts of consumption recorded by the Electricity meter over a period of 1 hour. So to run a 1000 watt heater continuously for 1 hour would use exactly 1 unit of electricity, and at a cost of 30p per unit (KWH), a 1000 watt convector heater would cost 30p per hour to run. The next step for us was to look at all of the products that fall within the Heaters and radiators category, of which we found 55 products at Argos. So we pulled together all of the prices of these products to analyse the average prices as well as finding the cheapest and most expensive options.