Electric Blanket to help reduce home heating needs?

[Lazarus]

So I turn the heat down throw on a couple of extra blankets one of which is electric to sleep and save a little. I stick the Kill-A-Watt on it and when I check it this morning the thing pulls .5KW an hour. That's a shocker. Those blankets pull a lot of watts.

[SVOboy]

That they do!

Have you seen the heated mattress covers? Those looks better than blankets for that same thing,

[Who]

I've measured our heated mattress pad at a penny or less per side per night. I'm shocked that an electric blanket would pull that much current.

[AndrewJ]

The wife has recently wanted to turn on a small electric space heater on at night. I know that the thing probably pulls tons of watts, and it doesn't even heat the room up that much.

I recently convinced her to start microwaving 1L of water in a Nalgene bottle and keeping that under the covers. If you get the water just to the boiling point it'll keep hot nearly all night. Plus it's more noticeably warm than a space heater (or even an electric blanket)

[bennelson]

Electric blankets do pull a lot of heat, but at least they put it where you need it.

I can tell you that I will never again buy any sort of appliance without taking the Killawatt with me to the store and see how efficient the appliance REALLY is!

[Fudog1138]

My sunbeam electric mattress pad (Queen size bed) pulls 350 watts max. I keep it at 2 or 3. Has one controller per side. Ranges from low-8.
I haven't got a kill o watt (ordered one last week), but I do know that the wattage rating on items is max rating. So in my case I don't think that I'm pulling that much. But now you have given me something to think about.
I keep heat at 62 at night and 68 durring the days that the family is here. If its just me I drop down to 65.

[bloodymaryjane]

My gosh no wonder my electric bill was so high!
Does anyone knows about a good energy efficient blanket?

[Who]

Just did some quick measurements of the Sunbeam queen sized mattress pad and there's some interesting observations.

Each side starts at around 50 - 65 watts and then drops down to under 30 watts. The control controls that temp at which it starts cycling off and on to maintain a certain temp setting. It doesn't control how fast it heats, it heats just as fast on Lo as at does on Hi, it just shuts off sooner. It doesn't take too many minutes before it cycles at a setting of 4. Not quite sure why the wattage keeps dropping the longer it is on. Does the resistance drop as the filaments warm up???

As stated before, in a full night it will use about a penny a side per night or less with a setting somewhere near the middle in a 65°-67° bedroom. Not bad... I think it was the first thing I measured when I got my WattsUp.

[NoCO2]

I've been experimenting with using the sun to heat my apartment recently. I'm lucky/unlucky that my apartment faces east, so for the first half of the day I get a good bit of sunlight in through the wall of windows in my living room. I turn the heat way down during the day, knowing full well that the sun coming in gets it to nearly 80F by 11AM-12PM and then I try to circulate that air into my bedroom while I'm out to hopefully get my room equally warm so I don't have to turn the heat up during the evening either. I have yet to get a Killawatt (though it's on the list) and I don't use electric blankets, but it's good to know what an electric blanket uses, I was considering getting one of those to substitute for running the heat, but it may turn out that the heater uses less power in reality...

[Lazarus]

Originally Posted by NoCO2

I've been experimenting with using the sun to heat my apartment recently. I'm lucky/unlucky that my apartment faces east, so for the first half of the day I get a good bit of sunlight in through the wall of windows in my living room. I turn the heat way down during the day, knowing full well that the sun coming in gets it to nearly 80F by 11AM-12PM and then I try to circulate that air into my bedroom while I'm out to hopefully get my room equally warm so I don't have to turn the heat up during the evening either. I have yet to get a Killawatt (though it's on the list) and I don't use electric blankets, but it's good to know what an electric blanket uses, I was considering getting one of those to substitute for running the heat, but it may turn out that the heater uses less power in reality...

Could you just run the fan on the heating unit to circulate the air or would that draw to much energy?