Electric baseboard heaters are reliable, economical to install, and let you adjust heat in each room—which can save money if you’re only using one bedroom on a winter weekend. Some rooms, though, are not suited to linear baseboard heaters.
In a cottage great room, especially one with floor-to-ceiling windows, wall space for conventional baseboard heaters can be limited. Floor-insert fan-forced heaters, which look like forced-air floor registers, push heated air up from floor level and circulate it through the space. They’re unobtrusive and can be located in front of windows or elsewhere in the room—anywhere you can hardwire them.
Kitchens, especially those with galley and U-shaped layouts, can be hard to heat when they’re all cabinets and no empty wall space. The cabinets have an unused strip along the floor, where a toe-kick fan-forced heater will fit. The heater itself is hidden underneath, with the register opening cut into the toe-kick panel.
This cottager saved cash by building his own heating system
In bathrooms, fixtures and cabinets eat up wall space, leaving little room for a baseboard heater. Here, a wall- insert fan-forced heater does the trick. Other hard-to-heat areas, including laundry rooms, hallways, and storage rooms, are good places for wall heaters too.
These fan-forced heaters are all hardwired and come in different wattages, which is what matters when choosing the right size. The simple equation to estimate how much electric heat you need for each room is 10 watts per square foot. All electric heaters are almost identically efficient—watts are watts are watts. Efficient electric heating comes from proper sizing and placement in each room: evenly distributed, but away from corners and doors.
This article was originally published in the August 2025 issue of Cottage Life magazine.
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