Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We bought this heater in an effort to make our fireplace more functional. Our fireplace is a woodburning fireplace, but it is merely decorative, and whenever we light a fire, it does very little to actually heat our living room. We also are always afraid we are going to burn our house down when we go to bed and leave hot coals in the fireplace. We thought it would be neat to have this nifty little device. 1. Heater - The infrared heater on this seems to be pretty powerful and feels like it won't have too much problem heating our 14x25-foot living room. It only has one setting, but does have a crude thermostat on the side. But let's be serious, when you want heat from a space heater, you only ever put it on High anyway, right? 2. Decorative qualities - it's very well made. The faux-embers glow randomly to create a realistic hot-coal burning effect. LED lights shine from the back of it to create a flame illusion on the back of the fireplace. It is not terribly bright, but is pretty convincing. I took off one star b/c the motor that creates this effect sometimes creates such a strong vibration that it resonates through the body of the heater, and makes a loud rattling sound. I had to play with the heater to make this resonance not happen, which, really, it could come back at any time. Also, the cord isn't long enough to plug into any outlet unless it's within 1 foot of your fireplace. We needed an extension cord. Other than that, I would have given it 5-stars easily. I really like that you leave the infrared heater off and just leave the flame effects on and use it in warmer weather. It's nice not to have a completely dormant fireplace! See pic below: I'll update this review this winter when we really use the heat from it. EDIT: UPDATE We love this thing! It really doesn't use a lot of electricity, and we used it quite frequently during the winter. On Christmas Eve, our furnace died and we had to spend the next week with no furnace. This stayed on for much of the week, and it kept our livingroom at 70F all week long all by itself. The heat is not very powerful, but it definitely does its job. We have no regrets.