Customer Reviews

Optimus H-4110 9-Inch Dish Heater

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(38)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

At the low prices at the time, I bought 4 of them.

Unlike a lot of radiant heaters that use a fragile glass, quartz halogen heating element, which are so bright it's like sitting in front of a bright yellow floodlight, or get dangerously hot, these use a durable nichrome & ceramic element that emits a very dim (but warm) red glow.

This is the smallest, lowest powered parabolic heater I ever found. Low power has some advantages in some situations, saves money, & reduces pollution.

There is no fan, so it's totally silent. Because it's only 300 watts, it does not get dangerously hot if nearby. But as with all heaters, you should use some common sense, like don't cover the heater or hang stuff over it, point it at curtains, or place it right next to bedding. I have one on a table about 3' away from the bed, yet I can feel the heat in bed on my face, about 7' away.

It has a standard, tip over, cut-off switch for safety.

This little thing is ideally suited as a desk or small area heater, but for it's low power consumption, it does put out a lot of heat towards what it's pointed at. Don't expect it to heat up an entire room like a 1500 watt or more heater. This heater only consumes 20% of the power. It will not be a suitable for your sole source of heat with the furnace off for a room or house if it gets near 0 degrees F outside. So buy several if you want to use these little heaters a lot to offset your heating bills.


Consuming such little power, they have the advantage of being plugged in most outlets & circuits shared by other stuff without overloading or overheating the outlet or circuit.

It'll take 5 of them to consume as much power as a standard, typical 1500 watt heater.

You save money because most people on the coldest days don't need to heat up the entire room nice & toasty, but only need to heat the area a lot where they're hanging out in. Thus, much less power is required to do it with these. Also, if you're in a drafty or poorly insulated older room, or one with high ceilings, your heat from traditional heaters may leak out fast or rise to the ceiling where you don't need it. Radiant heat feels warmer & is more efficient in those kind of rooms, by directing & concentrating the heat more towards the area it's pointed at.

Parabolic heaters focus the infrared heat in a concentrated direction like a spotlight would, instead of blowing it all over a room. Parabolic (dish) heaters focus this heat to a tighter area than other reflective types.

There's a lot of misconceptions & complaints about radiant heaters that simply are not true. They complain they do not heat up the whole room or as fast as other types of heaters. A 300 watt radiant heater will heat up an entire room just as fast & well as any other type of 300 watt heater, & any 1500 watt radiant heater will heat up a room as fast as any other type of 1500 watt heater would. But you'll feel hotter instantly in the direction a parabolic heater is pointed at instead of waiting for the heater to heat up the whole room.

The problem is people buy a 100-1200 watt radiant heater & expect it to warm up a whole room as fast & good as an over 1500 watt one would.

A 1500 watt or higher heater may strain, overheat, or overload your wiring more, & overheat the cord or outlet for regular or continuous use.

Update: One reviewer said, "Could be the radiant aspect of it not being able to penetrate sneakers and jeans. But since I prefer not to work naked, I replaced with a small ceramic unit that does the trick."

Nope, I believe it's because the heater is only a small, low powered 300 watt heater & your ceramic heater is probably 800-1650 watts. If you were to put an 800-1200 watt parabolic heater under your desk, you'd probably set your pants on fire.

QUOTE: "They are not heat dish. It was conventional electric heater. They are imitations, just the Style is like the heat dish. They even don't have auto thermos. No energy saver."

Reply: These ARE a heat dish & NOT a conventional heater, or more precisely, they're a parabolic heater... which is a heating element with a parabolic reflector. They focus a beam of heat to a narrow area it's pointed at. Like all of these types, some heat will still rise off the top of the heater too by convection too.

I consider these the safest types of heaters because they don't get too hot & don't make the house wiring warm or overload it at only 300 watts.

Small, Compact, but does what it says... Perfect for small room or in the bathroom(especially when you get out of the shower)

At the $15 price I paid, this was fair value but I wouldn't pay more than that. Don't let the appearance fool you. It's not a parabolic heater which uses a gas-filled bulb like the Presto or the Soleus, it's a reflective heater with a standard electric coil - this means it takes longer to heat up and its effective heating area is much smaller. I wouldn't recommend this if your desired heating area is more than 15 square feet. If all you need is something close by your work desk or computer it'll do the job - because the reflector doesn't adjust upward it works better if you set it on something a foot or more off the floor.

I've a small home office which gets quite cold during the Fall and Winter months in the high desert. And I'm a person who gets cold easily, dislikes feeling cold and often gets comments from other people about wearing long-sleeved shirts, jeans and socks with sandals during warmer months while others are sweating it out in T-shirts and shorts. Fortunately, I have this little office space all to myself so I don't have to listen to repetitive questions like: "How can you *stand* sitting in this hot room?"

October was unusually cold. Huddling with blankets didn't cut it, so my S.O. offers me a small ceramic heater. The size was fine, but using this sort of fan-centric, forced air heater in a tiny room was both noisy and amounted to serious energy overkill. I had visions of a triple-digit electric bill. Even on a low setting, the little ceramic bugger would consistently kick in and gradually turn this space into what even I considered a sauna. Thus irritated and lacking gobs of money to hurl at the problem, I spent many hours online researching inexpensive, energy-efficient heaters and comparing the best places where such a unit could be purchased without paying exorbitant shipping rates or driving fifty miles round trip to roam the closest brick & mortar. This little Optimus heater is the one I kept returning to again and again. I read review after review on site after site. Despite some complaints (many being difficult to fathom if a potential buyers reads and genuinely understands the product specifications) and one very negative review here on Amazon which told me nothing about the quality of the heater, I'm here to announce that I really love this little jewel.

UPDATE: 10/26/11 This "little jewel" of a heater was not very robust at all. It worked well for my needs, while it worked at all. After little more than 3 months of use (not continuous)in my office space, this heater began to behave badly. I'd switch it on and it would fail to respond. I'd switch it off, move it a foot away, wait several minutes, switch it on and it worked. The floor is level & i gave it adequate "breathing room" wherever i placed it, so there was little logic to this exercise. Evidently, something came loose that made contact again when I moved it. I managed to get the heater to come back to life exactly 3 times using this method. Then it refused to function no matter what I did. It had never been tipped over & I treated it gently. Followed every instruction in the booklet that came with the heater (it was not described as being so delicate as was indicated in the product "manual"). My 5-star review has dropped to a 2-star review due to the inconvenience of having to purchase a heater costing twice as much halfway through winter. I certainly wasn't going to buy another one of THESE. I found an energy-efficient space heater for $40 that is still fully functional after many hours of use..& it can be adjusted, unlike this heater which is either 0 or |.

This heater was not intended for use in a bathroom. This wasn't a problem for me as there isn't a bathroom even adjacent to my office. Because this is the high desert, autumn & winter typically includes a period of rain and infrequent snow falls. It is difficult to imagine the humidity levels in my office approaching anything even remotely like a steamy bathroom, even when rain fell for days. The roof isn't leaking & the pipes didn't burst. There was simply no rational explanation for this heater "sputtering and dying" as it did. I didn't leave it turned on for extended periods of time: 3 hours, at most. I just did a sanity check on it this morning to see if it would miraculously come back to life: took it out of the box, plugged it in, flipped the switch to the "On" position and..? no such luck. It's so cheaply made that it might be worthwhile trying to take it apart to determine where it failed.. but then I'd be afraid to plug it into a wall socket again. OK. So it was inexpensive & seemed like a great idea for saving energy. Ultimately, a heater that fails to work is a splendid energy saver! As far as being cost-effective, I ended up paying about 20 bucks for something that will end up in a pile of junk at the town-wide cleanup this Saturday.

I apologize to anyone who purchased this heater based on my (former) 5-star review. Of course, as is often the case with these "bargains", it began to fail AFTER I still had the option to return it. I should have updated the review when the heater ceased to function. Hopefully, anyone reading this in future will notice how my joyous enthusiasm faded & will be able to make a more informed decision than I did nearly two years ago.

I just inventoried the 5 Optimus H-4110 dish heaters I've purchased from Amazon over the past 24 months.

1 died within Amazon's 30 day return period, and was replaced by Amazon. The replacement still works.
1 died 3 days after the end of the return period. It's being returned anyway at my expense for a partial refund.
3 died at varying times from 3 months to a year and were deemed too expensive to return to Optimus under warranty. Failures were
determined to be in the ceramic heating coils, making them unrepairable.

Bottom line: these are fine little heaters while they work, but that simply won't be very long at all.

I had a heat dish-type space heater that I purchased several years ago, and it worked great. Recently I saw this same heat dish style on internet so I ordered it. When I opened the box I was amazed to find the size was a lot smaller than I had expected it to be. None-the-less, for its small size it puts out enough heat to warm you if you are sitting right in front of it. It however does not do much for warming an entire room. I would only recommend this heater if you intend to use it for just up close heating.

I bought two of these and they work great. The dish nicely focuses their 300 watts of silent heat to warm you up to 6 feet away. Dish heaters have more "reach" in the sense that they don't have to blow hot air all the way over to you, since they are basically heating with infra-red light (like the sun) instead of warm air. They only heat what they shine on though. Obviously 300 watts is fairly small, so don't expect this heater to heat an entire room. Get a heater with 5 times and wattage and hence five times the operating expense in electricity if you want more total heat.

My one complaint about this unit is that the dish can be only aimed anywhere from level to partially upwards. Very poor design considering a likely use is to put the heater on a surface above you and have it shine at a down angle, such as onto a couch or a bed. Personally I don't want the heater on the ground where stuff is likely to come into contact with it. But fortunately a little modification with a small saw on the plastic body can be done to open up the angle some and allow it to shine at a down angle as well.

There are a lot of reviews saying this thing is TINY, it's not that small. It stands roughly 14" tall and 10" wide, and puts out well more heat than a traditional space heater of three to four times the wattage.

It's very easy to use, no maintenance necessary, absolutely quiet, powerful, precise heat directionality, and heats up very quickly (within 30sec).
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The good: powerful, efficient, precise;y targetable, quiet, safe.

The bad: can be a bit bright to have facing you while you sleep, I just aim mine below eye level in my direction and let convection do the rest.

Bought two about a month ago. Then bought another two within a week because we like them so much. They are compact, low power consumption, quiet (actually no sound), effective and safe (not too hot besides the safety shut off mechanism when fall). They are perfect for heating a small area in a big room which you can not afford to heat up. I have a huge office in my basement which is very cold (~52 degrees). With the small heater about 2 feet in front of my feet, I feel really very comfortable. My feet used to be very cold and uncomfortable before I bought these heaters and now I feel really good. Yes, it has no thermostat, but is not a problem for me. Its plastic body seems pretty solid for me and it is light and compact to move around. Comparing to my other 1300-1500 W heaters, this 300 W heater makes me happy to run anytime I want without worrying about my electric bill (less than 5 cents/hour for each of the heaters).

Length:: 0:11 Mins

This isn't one of those oxygen sucker heater fans that I wake up with a congested head with. If you have sinus(allergy) problems like myself, this may be your best bet.

Video: This heater doesn't have any irritating blower noise. NONE!
(the little noise you do hear is from my external fan from my video game system)