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Originally Posted by John Mercier
1500w is the measure of the electricity used... not the heat produced.
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For the purposes of these discussions, it's exactly the same. All plug-in electric heaters will produce the same amount of heat for a given amount of power consumption.
The primary difference between an infrared heater and a "regular" electric heater is going to be how the heat is focused or directed. The infrared heater will let you direct the heat output more on a specific object, such as on yourself, instead of blowing it around the entire room.
An infrared heater might help you go from feeling a little chilly to feeling warm, without having to heat the entire room to do so. But, if you're looking for something that is going to work as a heat source that keeps your overall house warm, neither one is going to offer any cost savings advantages. And, if you're using the infrared heater to heat yourself, and you move away from it, you'll likely feel chilly again pretty quickly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John Mercier
I think I explained that pretty simply with the light bulb example.
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Well, not really. LEDs and filament bulbs produce light in two very different ways. It's about the same as comparing gas and electric heaters. While we have a handful of different ways to produce light with electricity, with varying degrees of efficiency, when it comes to producing heat with electricity, we have been at essentially 100% efficiency for quite some time already.
Heat is a natural by product of any electrical circuit, in most cases we take great pains to try and reduce the amount of heat generated by an electrical circuit, it's just waste in that scenario. But if heat is the actual thing we want from the electric circuit, that has been a solved problem with nearly perfect efficiency for over a century. You can take your pick of what electric heater form factor you prefer, but they're all going to produce the same amount of output for a given wattage.