Reddit reviews Lasko 755320 Ceramic Space Heater 8.5 L x 7.25 W x 23 H inches

Oh man. Brace yourselves, I am a total Amazon junkie. (Note: These may not all be BIFL, but I'm responding to the OP in specific.)

• $9 butter keeper. (I bought a slightly different one that's no longer available, but it's the same basic design.) Keeping butter that isn't for cooking or baking in the fridge is for chumps. Mine is always perfectly spreadable room temperature while staying fresh for weeks... sometimes months.
  
  
• $9 TV antenna. I didn't own a TV until a few years ago, and it didn't have a built-in antenna. I don't watch much broadcast TV, so I grabbed the cheapest one I could find. Case in point for why digital is better than analog, this one picks up every digital channel perfectly.
  
  
• $13 shoe rack (now $18). Over the past year of living in this flat, I'd developed a bad tendency of kicking my shoes off at the bottom of the stairs just inside the front door. This looked like a cheap piece of shit, but I figured for the price I couldn't go wrong. Now almost every single pair of shoes I own is in one spot where it's easy to grab—and, more importantly, everything's out of the way of people coming in and out of the house.
  
  
• $14 jug of earplugs (50 pair). Essential for sleeping with the window open in loud neighborhoods, sharing rooms with snoring friends on a trip, or sharing beds with snoring dudes or gals you're sleeping with. These were also my go-to earplugs for shows until I got a pair that's better for listening to music.
  
  
• $22 electric kettle. The coffeemaker in our office puts out water that isn't nearly hot enough for a proper cuppa, and I got sick of microwaving it to boiling a mug's worth at a time. No bells and whistles, but it's performed perfectly since day one, with no breaking-in period like you get with kettles that have plastic parts in contact with the water.
  
  
• $32 32'/10m HDMI cable. Ran it between the computer in my bedroom and the TV in my living room, allowing me to watch all kinds of streaming TV and downloaded videos with friends in a spot more comfortable than standing in front of my desk.
  
  
• Slightly over the $50 limit, but $53 space heater. My best friend and roommate is one of those dudes who's built like a furnace, and our place uses radiators for heat. We had a few days of him sweating his ass off even with the thermostat set to 68, before I realized that we could just turn it way the hell down, and I could heat my own bedroom separately. This sucker dumps out a ton of heat, with a slew of features to sweeten the deal (my favorite being the remote control).
  
  
• Another that's slightly over, but $55 garment steamer. Collapses small enough to fit pretty much anywhere I've ever needed to store it, puts out steam within maybe 30 seconds of turning it on, and with a full tank has enough water to steam as many items as I've ever needed to do in a row. I haven't touched my iron once since I bought this thing, and my only regret is not buying one as soon as I started college over a decade ago.
  
  And, saving the best for last:
  
  
• $43 heated footrest. Hands-down, this is one of the best things I've ever bought in my life. I was looking for an unobtrusive, unobnoxious way to help myself stay warm in the office, which tends to be chillier than my taste year-round. When I opened it up, I was skeptical, since it looked like a cheap injection-molded piece of shit. Now, I'm pretty sure I'd rescue it from a fire before my mother. I don't want to imagine ever trying to get through another winter without it.
  
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  EDIT: As requested by /u/Mogrix, I posted List Part II: Electric Boogaloo, with more items from my Amazon history.

I live in Boston in a house built over 100 years ago. Needless to say, we either have to keep it chilly or pay a lot to heat it. We opt for the former, but we do take some other steps to minimize how the cost. My house is a rental, so we can't do actual work on it, but here are some tips for easy ways to keep your heating bill down:

• Seal your doors and windows. Put plastic over the windows. They have specially made plastic for this that you basically tape up and then shrink with a hair dryer to tighten. It's not the best looking thing ever, but if you do it well, it can actually look fine. In terms of doors, door sweeps and weather stripping will do wonders for preventing drafts. You know how they say a team is only as strong as its weakest player? Well beefing up the insulation in your walls and attic won't do very much if the air can just get in through the doors or windows.
  
  
• Put on a sweater. We keep our house at just over 60 degrees in the winter. This means that we're wearing clothes most of the time. Sweatpants, sweaters, fleeces, wool socks, slippers. This is by far what has saved us the most money on our heating bill.
  
  
• Get a space heater. I have a nice one. It oscillates, has a remote, multiple heat modes, and a timer. I can turn it on before bed and have it turn off after an hour (or whatever I set it to). I can also use the remote to turn it on when my alarm goes off, hit snooze, and it'll be nice and warm when my alarm goes off again.

Two questions:

1. As split-screen (and even LAN) console games are so rare these days, what did you guys play?
   
   
2. That (I'm assuming) heater/tower thing looks strikingly similar to the Lasko one I just bought. How well does your heat up your home?

Then I would recommend getting a few of these heaters; I used 3 them to heat a ~800 sq ft house a couple of years ago for the whole winter, and it only raised my electric by about $50 to keep it around 75 degrees. Contrast that with using the baseboard heaters in the same house, and the savings was nearly $400/mo (baseboard heat is highly inefficient at best, especially if it's older - running it put our electric bill over $600/mo... yeah, no.) They have a built-in thermostat and cut off to save power when the ambient temperature gets high enough. I still have them and break them out to heat up the bathroom before showers every winter; they're still going strong!

Also, you might want to check out /r/personalfinance to maybe help out your situation a little more and get better advice about the financial aspects of what you're going through.

(Programmable Space Heaters)[ Lasko 755320 Ceramic Tower Heater with Digital Display and Remote Control https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000TTV2QS/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_3Hcwub0NAY876] We have been using ones like these since our first was born 4 years ago. They are great. Lots of built in protections. We have the ones Costco Sells but they are all about the same.

Set the temp you want and it will cycle on and off to maintain that temp.

This is greenhouse.

This is heater.

I have this. Slight over budget, but I love it. It does a great job of heating up a 12 x 12 room that is not hooked up to the HVAC system and the remote is priceless on cold mornings.

Get one of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TTV2QS

You can set the temperature to something and it will turn off once that temperature gets reached. Then when it gets colder it will turn back on.

It makes some white noise but hopefully the baby won't have issues with this. I use one of these in my office upstairs and in the basement. They work spectacularly. I just set it to 72 while the thermostat for the rest of the house stays at 68 and I'm comfortable.

It'll oscillate and whatnot but I usually just aim it away from me and it does a great job of heating up entire rooms even with the door open. It is blowing the heat directly onto me it gets annoying.

I'm not sure what your question is exactly. At no point did I claim that one was somehow creating more heat than the laws of physics allow. If you're confused about the difference between a radiator, which heats a room slowly and retains heat, and a fan/ceramic/etc (all known as space heaters afaik - like this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000TTV2QS/ref=mp_s_a_1_12?qid=1405371454&sr=1-12&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70), then google might help.

They both heat "space" but have different purposes. Ones that directly heat the air around them use more electricity than those which heat a liquid which retains and radiates the heat in order to bring up the temperature of a larger enclosed space. But don't take my word for it. Look up the specs for portable oil filled heaters vs heated element heaters for the same square footage, as your area might have something more efficient than what is available in mine, or your needs for the space might be different (enclosed room vs desk in an open warehouse, for instance).