I’m an HVAC Expert Who’s Spent His Life in Old, Drafty Houses. This Is My Favorite Space Heater.

Most space heaters are designed a lot like blow dryers: A simple ceramic heating element gets hot, and then a fan moves the heat.

Several of Wirecutter’s picks for the best space heaters work this way. They’re often cheap and always fast, so if you need only an hour or two of heat at a time, they make a lot of sense. For example, when my wife and I want to watch a bit of TV in our finished-but-frosty basement before bedtime, we turn on our fan-forced electric fireplace instead of the radiator.

But over longer periods — like a day of work in my half-heated home office or a night in my basement-level guest bedroom — the De’Longhi radiator is a better option.

For starters, it’s a little bit safer than a fan-forced heater. There’s no exposed heating element, so the risk of burning your skin or igniting a nearby curtain is lower.

One of my colleagues told me that when she hears “oil-filled radiator,” it evokes an image of a bubbling cauldron of tar that could tip over and fry the dog or at least ruin a rug. Another editor said she “thinks it’s good to explain that ‘oil-filled’ doesn’t mean ‘gas-powered,’ because that’s what I thought, to be quite honest.”

Here it is for the skittish: An oil-filled heater doesn’t burn oil. It plugs into a wall socket, just like any other electric heater. Mineral oil is sealed inside the heater’s metal casing; as it warms up, the mineral oil helps the heater retain and radiate heat efficiently. There’s nothing to maintain or refill, and you’ll never actually see or touch the oil. Just pretend that it’s filled with olive oil, if that makes you feel better.

And Justin LaGrasse, a product manager at De’Longhi, explained that mineral oil is actually safer than water for this use case because it has a higher boiling point, so it’s less likely to over-pressurize the system and burst.

Radiators also create an especially cozy, enveloping kind of warmth.

Fan-forced heaters are excellent at boosting the air temperature, but air temperature alone can’t make a room feel truly comfortable, said Allison Bailes, president of Energy Vanguard, a building science and HVAC design firm in Decatur, Georgia.

The mean radiant temperature, or “the temperature of the surfaces that are all around us,” also has a huge impact on your sense of comfort, Bailes said. That’s where radiators excel.

A fluid-filled radiator, like the De’Longhi, will boost a room’s average surface temperature because it is, by itself, a fairly large and very warm object. It glows (invisibly) with infrared energy, which your body feels as heat — even when the air temperature doesn’t change much.

This is the same reason why an air temperature of 65 °F can feel brisk on a cloudy day but glorious when it’s clear outside: If you can see the sun, it’s pounding you with enough infrared heat to offset the mild air temps.

I feel the difference in the quality of my radiator’s heat every time I duck downstairs during the workday to grab a snack.

The first floor of my house is heated reasonably well by a central furnace, which is essentially a giant fan-forced space heater. The thermostat reads 70 °F, and I can live with that. However, when I walk back up to my office, where the radiator is cranking and the air temperature is also around 70 °F, it feels like I’m sliding into a warm bath.

And fan-forced heaters have a lot of other downsides when compared with radiators. While a blast of warm, fan-blown air in a cold room feels nice initially, the air movement eventually starts to feel drafty.

Fan-blown hot air can also cause dry eyes or dry skin, said David Heinzerling, a mechanical engineer at Taylor Engineers, in Alameda, California, and a former chair of ASHRAE’s committee on thermal comfort standards.

Radiators are also much quieter, and they might save a couple kilowatt-hours of energy over the course of a day.

Plenty of other types of indoor space heaters work more like radiators than like fan-forced models. They include some stylish but pricey options, such as the mirror-like, wall-mounted Boldr Kelvin (which, at around $400, is approximately twice the price of my De’Longhi). And that’s great, but I don’t mind the De’Longhi’s looks or footprint. And I need something I can move around easily, so I’m happy to have saved some money by choosing a radiator.

It should also be said that nothing is perfectly safe. Space heaters (of all types) cause more than 1,000 house fires per year. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission has documented several dozen cases since the 1990s of radiators that have leaked and sprayed hot oil, or had other problems. But this De’Longhi model hasn’t been implicated in any serious accidents that we know of.

I also need to point out that, in this article, I’ve described a few behaviors that safety experts would not recommend, such as leaving my radiator running (briefly) unattended and hooking it up to a smart plug. I understand these products and my home’s electrical system well enough to make my own decisions about when and how to use them responsibly.

But I also know that most people are clueless about HVAC and electricity, so it is my professional duty to urge you to get familiar with the best practices for space-heater safety.

In a perfect world, I’d fix my home’s main HVAC system so that I wouldn’t need space heaters at all. That could mean getting the ductwork sealed and balanced or adding a super-efficient mini-split heat pump to whichever rooms need one.

But those projects cost thousands of dollars, so for now, I’m comfortable — thermally and financially — with this radiator.

This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Catherine Kast.