Customer Reviews

Vornado EH1-0032-28 TouchStone 500 Vortex Full-Room Electric Heater

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I have owned a few of these hot air fan heaters and this is by far the best. I have a large apartment with about a 12' high ceiling and I can notice the "vornado action" moving a feather hanging from a dreamcatcher at the corner of the ceiling with the fan sitting on the middle opposite side of the floor. This shows me that the fan is truely pumping the air around as it is heating and it is not just a gimmick or false claim. Other fans I have had did not do this and took like an hour to heat the room. The Vornado takes the chill out of the room within 15 minutes and is nice and warm reaching thermostat temperature by 30 minutes (most of the time depending on how cold it is.) What's even more impressive is that it is also so quiet I don't even know it's on sometimes!

However, since nothing is perfect here are a some design suggestions for the manufacturers:

1) The Sony remote problem is true, I have the same problem but thankfully my bed blocks my TV remote's "line of fire" so it rarely turns down the heater but it has on several ocassions--- Vornado should have picked a more obscure signal to use for the remote.

2) The remote needs to be more ergonomic so it's easy to hold and there should be indentations on the buttons so that you know what to press when fumbing in the dark--as it is now it's too small and impossible to tell if you're even holding it in the right direction.

3) The fan is so quiet it would be nice if the red "on" light would actually turn green so that you know it's on.

4) The blue LCD display is way too bright--it's like having 2 nightlights on in the room...very annoying and I wish it was darker since there is no need for it to be so bright (I'd put black tape over it but then can't see the temperature).

Overall though, only buy this if you are truely a design freak, it is beautiful and the quality of the metal housing is well worth the price if you are willing to drop that much money on a heater to just look stylish.

In terms of function though you can get the exact same results by buying the much cheaper (about half price) original Vornado without the remote. A friend of mine has this original Vornado which is what inspired me to buy mine. There is also a "clone" type heater competing with the original Vornado made by Holmes and I suspect the performance of that one is going to be very comparable and also a bit less expensive. Hope this helps you decide!

Update - 2 months after bought it - it broke, the fan intermittently stops running & the heat stays on so it starts burning itself up, it filled the room with strong burning smell/smoke. NOT safe.

We purchased the Vornado Touch Stone Vortex Heat 500 about a month ago. We have a room that is consistently colder than the other rooms in the house. We don't understand WHY it is colder since it was an addition, attached to the main central air /forced air heating unit, is actually BETTER insulated with more up-to-date windows, but is about 6 degrees colder (warmer in the summer) than any other room in the house. I plugged the Vornado in and the room is actually WARM! I am very impressed with this little, very quiet... you can't hardly tell it is running!... machine. I would definately recommend it to anyone that has this problem. We DO have a Sony TV/Remote, but the TV is in another room and doesn't affect the use of the machine. Actually, I leave ours on all the time and don't even need the remote. If this is the case I would go with the pp suggestion with getting the version without the remote. Had I realized that it was just as powerful I would have saved a few dollars and gone with the remoteless one for our use. HIGHLY recommend this item. I am very pleasantly surprised at how well this little unit works.

I bought the Touchstone for my home office. It's a decent space to heat but I wanted to heat only that space rather then heating my whole house. The Vornado does the job. It produces a good amount of heat fairly quickly. The room gets comfortably warm in a matter of minutes. Perhaps about 10 minutes for a 10X12 room with a 8' ceiling. The heater is pretty quiet, I know it's there but it is not enough to disturb me while I am working. The remote and digital display are kind of unnecessary. In retrospect I would have bought a unit that does not have those features, if I could save money. This unit is pretty pricey. It works well, does the job but, is $$$.

We have been using this heater for about 5 months now in our infant daughter's room. Up until last night, the product was fine. Last night we could smell a burning smell from outside of her room coming from the heater! The heater has never been moved and is always set to the same temperature so we are not sure what happened. Needless to say, this was extremely scary and we won't be using it anymore! All reviews I've read for the product are generally good so perhaps this is a fluke.

The LCD light on the top is also very bright and annoying - it never turns off.

This is a well built heater; cool to the touch, and very stylish. It is quite expensive, has remote control, but just doesn't put out enough heat compared the the Holmes heater at a fraction of the cost. They designed the vortex to only produce 120 degree heat and that just doesn't get the job done. The Holmes feels much warmer and is also cool to the touch!

I bought this heater at the end of January, and the digital temperature readout stopped working in June. All that's left is a few lines instead of numbers. Since this heater is in my baby's room, I don't like leaving it on without knowing the temperature. My only other complaint up until now was that the light on the temperature readout was way too bright. It lit up the entire room. The heater has a 2 year warranty, so I will probably exchange it for the same model.

Here's the deal:

- It has the same output as the cheaper models
- The Heater uses a fan, so you will hear the fan, granted its not the loudest fan.. Additionally, at every interval when the thermostat kicks in, you hear a loud enough click. If you want a silent heater, buy a convection heater
- The most annoying aspect of this heater is the display at the top of it. It has an LCD style display in a pretty colorful blue which NEVER turns off. So in a dark room there is this nightlight effect. Totally annoying!
- Finally, the feature on this unit is EXTREMELY basic. Hi Fan low Fan aand aa digital reading of the room temperature. WOW! is it really worth twice as much as the other models? NO its not. Additionally the casing seems flimsy. Nothing to suggest a hi end unit.

In the end the heater isn't bad, just not worth $150 average when yoiu can get one for $70 average. Good Luck

I had been using the non remote control digital Vortex heater for years now and love it. It's better than the conventional heaters and heats up the rooms fast and evenly. When my heater broke which is a common problem with the digital vortex heater which have a tendency to break after about a year. (I was on my second one but kept buying because they work so well) So when I saw this remote control version I wanted one in my room because I'm lazy to get up at night to turn it on or off and since my heater broke I picked one up. Love the design and remote control......... HOWEVER this new version is not as nearly as powerful as the old Digital Vortex Heaters. The max temperature you can go to is only 85 degrees but the old Vortex is 90 degrees and I do notice a big difference in power as the older can make the room super hot in a short time but with this heater it can get very warm after some time but I do miss the power of the older heater. That's my only gripe but other than that it's a good heater.

This heater has one good quality--it is quiet. Unfortunately, the thing it does not do well is heat. At the HI setting there was just the barest zephyr of warm air coming out, perhaps the unit was defective. There seems to be just one loop of wire heating element that just does not seem adequate to heat any size room. Units costing a small fraction of the Vornado perform as well or better.