Fan heater running cost NZ: cheap to buy, expensive to own
A fan heater is the cheapest heater on the shelf - about $40 - and one of the most expensive things in the house to live with. At 2,000W it costs roughly $0.73 an hour to run. Three hours a night through a New Zealand winter is about $199.
In other words, the running cost overtakes the purchase price in the first fortnight, and then does it again every year for as long as you own it.
Purchase price is the wrong number to compare
| Heater | To buy | Per month | Per winter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fan heater | $40 | $66 | $199 |
| Oil column heater | $120 | $80 | $239 |
| Heat pump (same heat out) | $3,000 | $25 | $76 |
The heat pump row is the same heat output as the fan heater, billed at a realistic winter coefficient of performance rather than the showroom figure. It costs $122 less per winter for the same warmth, which means the install pays for itself in roughly 24.2 winters against running a fan heater as your main heat source - and keeps paying for the fifteen or so years after that.
That comparison only holds if the fan heater is doing real work. Used for ten minutes in a cold bathroom, it costs almost nothing and no heat pump is going to beat it on value.
The instant-heat illusion
The reason people reach for a fan heater is that it works immediately, and the reason it seems to work immediately is worth understanding, because it explains what it is actually good for.
A fan heater does not warm a room faster than an oil column heater of the same wattage. It cannot - both are putting exactly 2.0 kW of heat into the same volume of air. What it does is blow that heat directly at you, so you feel warm within seconds while the room itself is still cold.
That is genuinely useful. It is also the trap: because it feels like it is working, it gets used as a main heater in rooms it will never bring up to temperature, running for hours at the top of the table above.
What a fan heater is actually for
There is a narrow job it does better than anything else, and it is worth keeping one for exactly that:
- Short bursts in a small room. Ten minutes in a bathroom on a winter morning. At $0.73 an hour, ten minutes costs about 0.12.
- Warming one person, not one room. Under a desk, pointed at you, while the rest of the house stays cool.
- Occasional backup in a room with no other heat source, used a handful of times a year.
What it should not be is the thing keeping your living room warm every evening from May to September. If that is the job, the table above is the argument for a heat pump, and our guide on what a heat pump costs to run covers what to expect from one.
Safety, briefly but seriously
Unlike an oil-filled column, a fan heater has an exposed element with air being driven across it. That makes it the more hazardous of the two in ordinary domestic use:
- Never run one unattended, and never overnight in a bedroom.
- Keep the intake and outlet clear. A towel over the outlet or a curtain against the intake is the standard failure.
- Do not use it to dry clothing. This is a common winter habit in damp New Zealand houses and it is exactly the wrong appliance for it.
- Plug it straight into the wall, not into a multi-box - at 2,000W it is one of the heaviest single loads you will plug in anywhere.
To price your own usage, open the calculator. To see how resistive heating compares across the board, the oil column heater page works through the efficiency argument, and the full appliance table ranks all 45.