The best heaters for home

Looking for the best heaters for home use? Then you've come to the right place. In this article, we reveal the five best devices to keep yourself warm and toasty.

With lockdowns returning around the world, it's the perfect time to make sure that you won't get chilly while remote-working from home across autumn and winter. Let's face it, you're going to be less creative and productive if you're shivering and miserable. So any money you can spare for a decent heater is going to be a wise investment indeed. 

The heaters on this list all provide a great way to raise the temperature of your environment, and are suitable for a range of budgets. While you're thinking about your home office set up, why not also check out our roundups of the best office chairs and best desks too?

Dyson is generally a name to trust when it comes to innovative, sleek-looking tech that just works. And this beautifully designed fan – the Dyson AM09 Hot + Cool Fan Heater – is no exception. Yes, it’s been around for a few years now, but it’s still never been bettered to date, and is our clear choice as the best heater you can buy right now. 

Not only does it looks very stylish, but it’s very unobtrusive and quiet in its operation, because its oval-shaped central cavity is blade-free. Instead, heated or cooled air is generated by an internal turbine and pumped out at very high speeds. This means your room warms up very quickly on a cold day, whereas on a hot one you can use it to create a refreshing cool breeze. It can deliver air at anywhere between 0 and 37 degrees centigrade and the digital thermostat ensures the ambient temperature is maintained, so your room won’t get overly hot or cold if you leave it on too long.

The AM09 is wonderfully safe, too: there are no external blades to cause accidents, and if you knock it over, it turns off automatically. The only real negatives are the fact that you can’t operate it without the remote, and the high price, although to our minds, that’s very much a case of ‘you get what you pay for’.

If you’re not bothered about designer looks, but just want a heater that does its job well, at a reasonable price, we’d recommend the Honeywell Home HCE840B. Not only does it heat up a room quickly and efficiently, but it has a number of useful settings. 

You can set it to maintain a constant room temperature, or engage the heat phase timer, which gradually reduces the temperature from a predetermined level over a two-hour period, before automatically shutting off. This is particularly useful late at night before bed, when the human body needs to cool down a little to sleep effectively. 

You can also direct the flow of heat via three settings, including a floor setting which only engages the lower heat element. And there’s also a self-explanatory ‘Quiet Mode’, which gives you a nice level of soothing white noise.

This little heater has great safety features too: it automatically turns off if tipped over in any direction, or if it exceeds temperature limits. And however much heat it pushes out, the housing and handle remain cool to the touch.

If you need to heat your home but are counting the pennies, we recommend this Jack Stonehouse Oil Filled Radiator Heater. Mounted on castors, it’s easy to move from room to room, and it comes with a generous 1.8m power cord and rewinder. With three heat settings and thermostatic control, you can set a comfortable and ambient temperature that will cover an area of up to 25 square metres. 

Because oil retains heat well, though, you often don't need to have it on all the time, as it remains hot for a long time after switching off. It runs without noise, there’s a red power indicator to remind you when it's on, and there’s a built in safety tip-over switch to guard against overheating. All this at such a low price represents very good value indeed. 

Want something affordable, but prefer a fan heater? Then our pick is the Dimplex DXUC2B, which is also super-cheap. It’s small in size and weight, making it easy to carry around the home, but nonetheless blasts out an impressive 2KW. This makes it more than capable of heating a small to medium-sized room, although if you have a large room you will need something more powerful.

The Dimplex DXUC2B offers a range of heat settings, including 'cool blow' and 'frost' settings for when you need to cool down rather than warm up. There’s also a mains-on light, an overheat safety cut-out, and it all comes with a three-year guarantee. Like all fan heaters, it’s noisy but not hugely so. And at such a low price, you really can't complain about that.

If you have a small room, you don’t want to take up a lot of space with a massive heater. So the tiny Anna Little, which is just 19 x 15 x 24cm and weighs just 1.5kg, is a great pick. Despite looking more like a speaker than a heater, with elegant clean lines and a sleek shape, this Swiss-engineered device is able to warm spaces up to 15 square metres using its self-regulating ceramic element. 

You can pre-determine the heat level using an adjustable thermostat, and built-in sensors automatically shut off your device if it gets knocked over or starts to overheat. Plus an integrated dust filter acts as a foam layer, cleverly keeping noise to a minimum. On the minus side, the temperature controls are a little fiddly. And be aware that once it's turn turned off, it won’t start it again until it’s completely cooled, which may be up to 20 minutes. 

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