Featuring an ultra-quiet design, it won’t disrupt you while you sleep or work. Plus, it has a timer , allowing you to set it to turn on and off automatically. The Lasko is not the most efficient space heater that we’ve tested. It uses a measured amount of 1.36 kilowatts per hour — which translates to $1.79 over 10 hours — to run this space heater on its highest setting at 13.17 cents per kilowatt-hour. That may not seem like much, but when running it for a month at 10 hours a day, it will cost $53.70.
It also just looks great, with a sleek design and simple controls that let you choose between basic heat settings or a specific, dialed-in temperature. Plus, it’s quiet and easy to clean, and it has all the safety features we usually look for, such as a tip-over switch and overheat protection. Add quick warmth to any medium- or large-sized room with this tower heater from Lasko. 1,500W of comforting warmth covers the room end-to-end with widespread oscillation.
A typical natural gas or coal generating station operates at about 30-40% efficiency, and the theoretical peak isn’t much higher than that, so at least 60% of the heat involved in burning the gas or coal goes up the stack as waste heat. That compares poorly to efficiencies of 80% to 96% for natural gas furnaces. That’s why, from a cost perspective, heating with electricity is generally much more expensive than heating with natural gas or oil. I tested the Lasko in May, which — fortunately for the purposes of this review — is a finicky month where I live in Italy. We had a heat wave, followed by a cold, rainy spell, followed by another heat wave. You no longer have digital access to ratings and reviews.
The Dr. Infrared heater is notably quiet, using its own technology to provide heat at a low speed, which makes it less noisy than comparable space heaters. Checkout The Best Space Heater for a detailed review of all the top space heaters. Although it costs more than many of the other heaters we tested, the Lasko FH500 isn’t overly pricey.
We were sure to start the assessment with the room temperature within a degree or two for each model. We didn’t want the temperatures outside the window of the room to affect the assessment, so we took care to ensure the outside temperatures were right around freezing. The Lasko CC24920 is part of the Space Heaters test program at Consumer Reports. In our lab tests, Space Heaters models like the CC24920 are rated on multiple criteria, such as those listed below.
The advantage of an analog unit is it provides greater control over temperature than the digital lasko heaters, which are mostly stuck on 5-degree thermostat increments. The disadvantage is that you have to set the heater based on experience of what a comfortable setting is, since there is no temperature readout. Many factors play into how convenient a space heater is to use. These devices can be as simple and bare-bones as possible, or they can come with a suite of features and settings. For this metric, we carefully studied every detail, down to how intuitive the symbols on the buttons of the remote control are.
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