Baseboard Heaters

[DrRod]

Greetings,

We have had electric baseboard heaters in our cabin for over 30 years and I think they are getting tired. They're slow to warm up and put out less heat than I remember -- plus, with all such things, technology has come a long way in 30 years. So I'm looking for recommendations -- brands, features, experiences, etc.

I should mention that they are the primary heat in the winter. We shut off the electricity when not there and someone shows up about every three weeks. Takes a while to heat up a cold cabin (two story, four bedroom) in a PA winter -- usually by the second day you can take your coat off. We have a big fireplace that helps a lot -- that's where we sit anyway. The bedrooms warm up first being small and upstairs, but the great room is a tall order for electric heat -- it just doesn't flow well.

Thanks,

Rod

 

[chim]

Years ago I worked for a contractor who did many "conversion" jobs on homes when the power company was pushing them. We used heaters with a 250 watt per lineal foot density. a 10-foot heater was 2500 watts. Rule of thumb was 10 watts per square foot of the room. I never had one get "tired". You might want to see if they were large enough to begin with. The ones that failed did so completely..................chim

 

[OkeeDon]

We just accepted an offer on our cabin, but we've had it for 17 years. It has electric baseboard heat throughout. We never shut ours off entirely because we didn't winterize the cabin; we turned the thermostats all the way down and they stay operating at about 40*. Even starting off at that relatively high temp, it always took at least 24 hours to warm up completely. Like yours, the upstairs loft bedroom warmed up first -- in fact, we rarely used the heater up there. Likewise, the smaller rooms, we closed the doors and they got warm faster. But, the 1-2/2 story great room took forever. The heaters are 33 years old, now, and seem to be working as well now as when we bought the place.

I looked in to converting the cabin to an LP gas furnace, but the access road is so steep, and the turn-around area so small, that the gas company said they couldn't get a bobtail to the cabin in the Winter to keep the tank filled.

What I ended up doing was to purchase a cast iron stove with an LP Gas log insert, and plumb it to a standard 40# propane cylinder that sits on the deck just on the other side of the wall from the heater. All it took was a small hole in the wall and a short length of iron pipe, some copper tubing on the inside and a rubber hose to the cylinder on the outside. We can take the cylinder in to town to have it filled. It's a little more expensive that way, but it works. We usually use the stove just for the first few hours, and the great room warms up great.

We tried a protable kerosene heater before that, but filling it was a pain in the butt.

We also have a working wood-burning fireplace we use for ambiance, but most of the heat goes up the chimney.

The cast iron stove is a Vanguard Amity model, vent-free for ease of installation; cost about $1,000 when we bought it. There are more expensive stoves (such as Vermont Castings) but this one is great. Check your local laws about th euse of a vent-free gas appliance, but I have no concerns -- the stove has an oxygen sensor that shuts it off if oxygen is depleted. I have no idea what NC laws are (where our cabin is located); I brought the stove up from Florida and just installed it without asking questions.