Baseboards need room to breathe


I love electric heating, but it does not come without its consequences. Every form of HVAC has some sort of adherent you need to deal with. If you have forced air, then you’re dealing with air filters which need to be changed at least once a month, if not sooner. If you have a boiler, then you need to change the furnace filter and have the water tank descaled every so often to stop limescale buildup due to hard water. Then if you have electric baseboard heating like we do, you have to worry about the baseboards themselves. Boilers heat the water, and the warm air rises gently from it. Electric baseboards are an electric heating unit hidden without that baseboard. If you push something close enough to the heating coil, it will get burned. Furthermore, those baseboards need to be pretty long to heat a room well. With a boiler, you just have a radiator that takes up only a small amount of space compared to a baseboard heater that runs the whole length of the room. Much like any vent for forced air or a radiator for a boiler, you have to make sure those baseboards are not covered. This is not easy when the baseboard runs the length of an entire wall. You have to get pretty well into minimalism to keep those things free. But even if you just put your bed next to the baseboard of your electric heater, you’ll run into heating problems down the road. No matter how much furniture shuffling you need to do, you’ll see a much warmer apartment by making sure you can see the baseboard heaters in every room.

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