About Warmfell
Why we bothered
Electric heating is the most misunderstood thing sold on the British high street. Not because it's complicated — it is, in fact, the simplest appliance in your home — but because almost everything written about it is written to sell something.
Warmfell exists because we got tired of reading it. The range is small, the product pages carry measured numbers rather than adjectives, and the page you're reading now spends most of its length telling you things that will save you money whether or not you buy from us.
Below are the five claims we see most often. Four of them are false. The fifth is true and nobody mentions it.
Claim 1 — "This type uses less electricity than that type"
False, and it isn't close.
Every electric heater sold in this country is a resistance heater. Push electricity through a resistive element and effectively all of it becomes heat — there is nowhere else for the energy to go. That is true of a £20 fan heater and a £600 designer panel alike.
So a 2,000 W heater produces 2,000 W of heat. All of them. Always.
| Type | What it actually changes | Heat at 2,000 W | Cost per hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Convector | Warms air, which circulates | 2,000 W | Identical |
| Oil-filled radiator | Stores heat, releases it slowly | 2,000 W | Identical |
| Fan heater | Moves warm air at you quickly | 2,000 W | Identical |
| Infrared / radiant panel | Warms objects and people, not air | 2,000 W | Identical |
What changes between them is where the heat goes, how fast you feel it and how long it lingers after switch-off. Those differences are real and they matter a great deal. What doesn't change is the meter.
The only exception is a heat pump, which moves heat rather than making it and genuinely delivers several times the energy it consumes. We don't sell them, and no plug-in room heater is one, whatever the listing says.
Claim 2 — "Leave it on low all day, it's cheaper than heating from cold"
False for a room heater.
A heater running on low for nine hours consumes more than the same heater running on high for one hour. The house loses heat to the outside in proportion to how warm you keep it, so the longer it's warm, the more you've paid for.
The advice has a grain of truth for a whole-house wet system with a slow, heavy boiler and a badly tuned thermostat. It has none for a 2 kW appliance in one room, which reaches temperature in minutes.
Heat the room you're in, when you're in it. That single habit does more than any product choice on this page.
Claim 3 — "A bigger heater will cost me more"
False, within reason.
A thermostat doesn't run the element continuously. It brings the room to temperature, switches off, waits for the room to cool a degree, and switches back on. A 2,000 W unit reaches the target faster and then spends more of the hour switched off; a 1,000 W unit runs nearly flat out to hold the same room at the same temperature.
Over an evening the consumption converges. What you've bought with the extra wattage is the speed of getting there.
Where it does go wrong is dramatic oversizing. Put a 3 kW heater in a small bedroom and it overshoots, cuts out, cools, kicks back in — and you spend the night in a room that swings between too warm and not warm enough.
Claim 4 — "Infrared heats the room better"
It doesn't heat the room. That's the point of it.
Radiant and infrared heaters warm surfaces and people directly, the way sunlight through a window feels warm on a cold day. The air temperature barely moves.
That is exactly right for a draughty conservatory, a garage, a workshop or an open porch, where warmed air escapes as fast as you make it. It is the wrong choice for a well-sealed living room, where you want the whole space warm and you want it to stay warm when you move to the other end of the sofa.
A radiant heater only warms what it can see. Step out of its line and the warmth stops with you.
Claim 5 — "It's the electrics you should worry about, not the heater"
This one is true, and almost nobody says it.
A 2,000 W heater on a UK 230 V supply draws around 8.7 amps. That is the largest continuous load most households ever put on a single socket — more than a kettle averages, and unlike a kettle it runs for hours.
- Plug it straight into a wall socket. Most manufacturers prohibit extension leads and multi-way adaptors outright. A thin or coiled lead carrying 8.7 A for three hours gets hot, and a coiled one can't shed the heat at all.
- Check the plug fuse. 13 A is correct for a heater of this rating. Never fit a higher-rated fuse than the manufacturer specifies — the fuse protects the flex, not the appliance.
- Don't share a socket circuit with other heavy loads. A tripping breaker almost always means something else is on the same circuit, not that the heater is faulty.
- Never cover a heater, and keep it clear of curtains, bedding and furniture.
- Bathrooms need a product specifically rated for one. If the listing doesn't say so, it isn't.
- Anything requiring fixed wiring is a job for a registered electrician, notified under Part P of the Building Regulations where that applies.
Everything we sell is built for UK mains — 230 V / 50 Hz, fitted with a BS 1363 three-pin plug — and carries UKCA or CE marking as stated on its product page.
So what should you actually buy?
Once you accept that running cost is the same, the question gets easier. It becomes: what is wrong with this room?
- A whole room that's simply cold — convector or oil-filled. Oil-filled if it's a bedroom or a study and you want silence.
- A draughty extension, conservatory, garage or covered outdoor space — radiant or infrared. Nothing else will keep up with the air loss.
- A workshop or utility room you're in for twenty minutes — fan heater. Loud, and you won't care.
- A room where the central heating almost gets there — smaller than you think. You're closing a gap, not heating from scratch.
As a starting point at a ceiling height of around 2.4 m: 60–80 W per m² for a well-insulated modern room, 80–100 W for average, 100–120 W for a cold room with a lot of glass. A 15 m² room lands somewhere between 900 and 1,800 W depending which row is yours. A corner room with three external walls wants more; a room with heated neighbours on both sides wants less.
What it costs to run
Work it out yourself in one line: kilowatts × hours = kWh. Multiply by whatever your tariff charges per unit.
| Heater | 1 hour | 4 hours | An evening, 6–10pm, all winter (90 days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 800 W | 0.8 kWh | 3.2 kWh | 288 kWh |
| 1,500 W | 1.5 kWh | 6.0 kWh | 540 kWh |
| 2,000 W | 2.0 kWh | 8.0 kWh | 720 kWh |
We don't print pound figures because the unit rate changes and a number published today is wrong by spring. Your own bill has the rate on it.
Those figures assume the element runs continuously. With a working thermostat, real consumption is well below them — typically half to two-thirds, depending on the room. Which is the strongest argument for paying attention to the thermostat, and the reason for the next paragraph.
The specification nobody reads
Of everything on a product page, the most underrated line is thermostat type.
A mechanical thermostat is a bimetallic strip. It swings two to three degrees either side of your setting — you feel the room get too warm, then notice it's gone cold. An electronic thermostat holds within roughly half a degree and cycles the element more often and more briefly, which is both more comfortable and slightly cheaper.
On a spec sheet they are one word apart. In a room you sit in every evening from October to March, they are not remotely the same product.
What gets onto the site
- UKCA or CE marking and manufacturer documentation. No documentation, no listing.
- Tip-over cut-out and overheat cut-out. Both, working, on everything.
- Flex length and conductor rating. A thin cable has no business carrying 8.7 A.
- Measured dimensions and weight, not estimated from a photograph.
Where a figure hasn't been confirmed to us, we leave the field empty instead of guessing. An empty field is honest. An invented one is how people end up with a heater that doesn't fit the alcove.
Not much clears that bar, which is why the range stays small.
Three things we don't do
Claim savings. You've read why. Any shop telling you its panel is cheaper to run than someone else's convector of the same wattage is either confused or counting on you being.
Manufacture urgency. No countdown timers. No "only 3 left" when there are three hundred.
Chase a look. A heater sits in your room all winter, for years. The finish that was everywhere for one season looks exactly like that for the rest of its life.
The first time you switch it on
Nearly every new heater smells faintly of burning for the first ten to thirty minutes. That's manufacturing residue and dust burning off the element — not a fault, and not a reason to return it. Open a window, let it run, and it goes.
Vacuum the element before each season. Otherwise the smell returns every autumn, and dust sitting on a hot element is the last thing you want in the room.
What you can count on from us
- Free delivery on every order, UK-wide, with no minimum spend
- 6–9 working days from order to doorstep, with tracking emailed on dispatch
- 30 days to change your mind, from the delivery date — 14 of those are your statutory cancellation right, the rest we add voluntarily
- 30 days to reject anything faulty outright, and up to 6 years to bring a claim under the Consumer Rights Act (5 in Scotland)
- Within the first 6 months, a fault is presumed to have been there at delivery — we have to prove otherwise, you don't have to prove anything
- Damaged, wrong or missing? We send a replacement. You pay nothing and send nothing back
- No restocking fee, no handling charge, no administration fee
- Free take-back of your old electrical equipment on a like-for-like basis when you buy from us
- A reply within 2 working days, from a person
Where we are
Warmfell LTD is an online shop based in Leeds, selling within the United Kingdom only. There is no showroom. The address below is for correspondence — it isn't open to visitors, and returns can't be dropped off there. We email the return address once a return is approved.
Email: support@warmfell.com
Phone: +44 113 222 1283
Customer service: Monday to Friday, 9:00 am–5:00 pm UK time
Saturday and Sunday: closed
Response time: within 2 working days
Warmfell LTD
Merrion Way, Leeds LS2 8NG, United Kingdom