Does quartz, amethyst, or turquise affect water qality in fish tanks?
I am also on said mailing list and have seen the TV ads. If you purchase a small electric heater of any kind at all and use it as a portable, personal heater , allowing you to lower the setting of the thermostat for the whole house, you will save some money. If you do not live alone you will also hear some complaints. You can do the equivalent by , er, dressing more warmly and not purchasing anything. To cover all the bases, maybe the Amish are selling knit sweaters too. One of the responses here is just another ad for such much-to-do-about-nothing quartz heaters.
Pretty much no. All resistive type electric heaters are 100% efficient in the sense that they convert 100% of the electricity they consume into heat. Since you can't have more than 100% efficiency each electric heater converts electricity to heat as well as every other one. It is converting heat to electricity that is costly. I've seen some of those ads. The ones by Eden Pure are deliberately misleading. Get a Holmes or DeLonghi or some other name brand from a local merchant and save a load of money and hassles.
The old saying is how do you know that the sales person is lying? His lips are moving! I tend to discredit advertising claims about efficiency and savings as mainly hype. Infrared heaters are relatively efficient in two respects: 1. the conversion of electricity to heat is quite efficient 2. infrared heaters tend to work by heating objects rather than air. That means that proportionately more energy goes into heating people in the area than in the air in the area. On the other hand, the cost of energy in its electrical form is much greater than in the form of some other fuel (such as natural gas or even heating oil). I think I would want to test the assertion with some real numbers before making that investment.
