Good heater for my basement; knob hasn't melted yet. Relatively safe around my toddler.
Written: Jul 06 '07 (Updated Jul 06 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Silent. Heats up fast. Two heat settings. Good grill design.
Cons: Different controls on the updated version seem to substantiate reports that the knobs are faulty.
The Bottom Line: Buy the updated BH-3950 for the same great features with a better design. Would have been 5 stars if the fire safety of the knobs wasn't a concern.
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| oldoligarch's Full Review: Bionaire BH3900-U Oil Filled Electric Radiator Hea... |
A few preliminaries
As others have noted, the epinions description of the Holmes / Bionaire BH-3900U's specs are incorrect in several places, although the image is accurate.
Some important differences:
(1) This heater is not oil-filled. It is "micathermic," which means it uses thin panes of heated mica to generate heat. This new noiseless technology is a real improvement compared to the typical "pinging" of oil-filled heaters as they heat up. Moreover, there's no hot oil to spill out if the heater is punctured, rusts out, etc.
(2) This heater is not digital. Specifically, there is no digital thermostat, only a good old-fashioned analog knob to set the temperature.
(3) There is no fan -- thank goodness (I wanted a totally silent unit, and that's what I got).
Usage
I use this heater to heat a cold bedroom in the basement. The bedroom is 330 square feet. It typically stays in the low 60s, sometimes a little colder on a cold, cold Virginia winter day. I wanted to get the temperature up to low 70s, which is comfortable for me. This heater was used a few times a week for about three months and did a great job.
Set-up and settings.
Set-up was easy: attach the feet and wheel casters and you're ready to go. Took me about 10 minutes, including unwrapping the sufficiently protective packaging. (Don't hesitate to push the feet firmly into place, like the instructions say.)
Plug it in, and away we go. There are two knobs on this unit. Knob 1 gives you three options: Off, Low and High. Knob 1 "clicks" from one setting to the next. Since they were labeled with tiny white circles on a gray chassis, I found these labels hard to see. Moreover, it is easy to forget whether the leftmost circle or rightmost circle is "Off." Since I never leave a heater unattended when I leave the house, being able to quickly check whether the heater was off is pretty important to me, so I took a black sharpie and wrote "Off," "Low" and "High" in the right places. Problem solved.
"Low" power draws about 500 watts, high draws 1500 watts. Low power seems to energize only the first few vanes of the heater; high uses all of them.
Knob 2 is temperature control, a continuous-adjustment knob. Basically, you turn it on, set it to max, wait until the room heats up to the desired temperature, and then slowly turn the knob down until you hear a slight "click" of the heater switching off. This is the only noise the unit makes, and the click is very slight. If the room is very quiet, you can hear the heater switching on and off if you are close by, but this only audible in a silent room. I cannot sleep through hardly any recurrent noise, but I could sleep with this heater cycling on and off.
Performance
In another review, I was dissatisfied with a fan driven unit. The one merit of that unit was that it threw a lot of heat quickly across the room. I was afraid that this fanless model would take a long time to heat up the room. Not so. During the first minute or two, you might hold your breath a little, since it takes that long to heat up. But once it gets going, the infrared heat from the vanes can be felt up to four feet away, and once the convection currents start the air circulating around the room, it heats up nicely. It heated the 330 square feet of bedroom (which measures 22' x 15' and has just one window) a few degrees in about a half-hour. I'd say this size room is just about right for this size heater. It also worked well in the cool 400 sq. ft. room above my garage, which has three windows. Here it takes about an hour to raise it about 5 degrees. Holding the room at that temperature is easy after that, but I have a newer home with good insulation (but awful windows), so your results may vary. Obviously if you have a barn loft with wind whistling through the walls, you're not going to do well with this unit.
When we go outside in the snow, I set this unit up in the hallway, and we huddle around it and warm our hands over it. It takes just a few minutes to get nice and warm.
My two biggest concerns
I had two major concerns when purchasing this unit:
(1) I have a toddler who runs around the house.
Unlike the supposedly child-safe unit that I had packed up and returned ASAP because it could easily burn your finger on its heated metal grill, the Bionaire BH-3900 has a much safer design. Even after it has been on for a while, the metal grill does not get alarmingly hot. There seem to be two reasons for this. Unlike the unit I returned, the heated air does not travel through the metal grill on its way out. Instead, the Bionaire is designed so that the hot air naturally rises out the top, and cooler air is drawn in from the bottom and the sides. Now, the radiant heat from the vanes does heat the metal grill surrounding them, but this grill is coated with some kind of plastic-like coating that minimizes heat transfer. (Half the reason why metal can burn you so quickly is that it transfers heat quickly, unlike, say, glass. Compare when you briefly accidentally touch a glass baking dish versus a metal oven rack even though both are at the same oven temp -- the rack burns you immediately because it transfers heat quickly to the skin.) So even though the sides of the unit do eventually get pretty warm, you can put your hand on it momentarily (say, 5 seconds) and not get a burn. Obviously only a completely irresponsible parent would leave a young child unattended around a hot heater for any period of time, but with the Bionaire BH-3900, I don't worry when my two year old daughter runs into the room. If she knocks it over, the unit has an automatic tip-over protection. If she touches the grill momentarily, it might hurt a little, but we're not going in for a skin graft or a serious burn.
The BH-3900 gets my vote as far as toddler safety is concerned.
(2) Fire safety
Risk of fire is a concern with any high-wattage appliance, especially heaters. Be sure to heed all the warnings: don't use an extension cord, don't put it right next to the wall, under drapes, near papers, etc. etc. Most of this is common sense.
I remain concerned that a few epinions users have reported melting or burning around the knobs of their unit. Read these reviews! I only read them after buying this heater. Nevertheless, I used it for three months without a problem last winter.
The BH-3900 performed so well for my needs I wanted to buy another one for upstairs. But the reports of faulty knobs worried me. Then I discovered that Holmes / Bionaire has updated this model and ditched the knobs in favor of switches on the BH-3950. To me, this confirms that there is a problem in the knob design. (They also made a few more minor upgrades in the BH-3950, which are all improvements.)
My overall verdict?
Works great for a medium-sized room. Buy the updated model BH-3950 instead of this one. The 3950 has all the merits of the 3900 and none of the concerns with knob design.
(See also my review of the BH-3950 for a comparison.)
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
oldoligarch
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Reviews written: 12
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