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As winter approaches, you want to make sure your heating game is up to snuff and one thing I’m always advocating for is a localized space heater. Electric heat isn’t the cheapest form of heat. In fact, it is probably one of the most expensive ways to heat your home. But by only heating the small part of your home you are actually in, you are allowing the rest of your home to remain much cooler and therefore saving a ton.
Which brings me to a great little product I found on sale at Crane’s eBay site for $42 shipped – The Crane infrared smartHEater mdoel EE-8077W. Normally around $150 and $137 at Amazon, this is a great deal, even as winter approaches and heater prices are at a premium.
I bought this one from Crane’s eBay store for what I thought was a very reasonable price: $41.91 shipped with tax. The ~15-inch square box came to me in New York in 2-days from Illinois and it is very light. The actual heating device comes 100% assembled – even the mid-grade coaster wheels are already on. All you do is plug it in.
Since this is a high power potentially 1.5kW device, you aren’t going to want to put it at the end of a power strip. You’ll want to plug it directly into a wall that hopefully has a 20A breaker. I put mine under my desk which allows me to heat up my desk area on low while I work for most of the day. It is the only heat I need until it gets to about freezing.
Setting up Crane Heater:
The device setup is confusing and probably the reason it gets some bad Amazon reviews vs. 4-stars at eBay. Anytime I actually have to look at the manual to set something up, I’m displeased. I was very displeased here.
So after turning it on, you have to hit the “rectangles” button five times and then hold down the up arrow for 5-seconds to get it into Wi-Fi pairing mode. Then, after installing the Crane app (which has an awful old school UI seen below). You can pair your phone to the Crane’s Wi-Fi, go back to the app and pair the Crane to your network. Once paired, you can personalize it with a location name and restart it.
That’s the hard part. From here it is just navigating (admittedly not great) menus to perform on absolutely excellent hardware that is cool to the touch.
The important part: It works really well
The Crane smartHeater has two heat settings: 750W and 1500W with Overheat Protection. On the 750W setting, I’m able to heat up my cottage work desk area enough to avoid needing other sorts of heat. In fact, it gets hot enough to wear shorts if I desired.
I like that I can start it up when I wake up in the morning and by the time I get to my desk it is warm. You can even have it start at a certain time and turn off at a certain time and this works flawlessly (see above screenshot). Maybe the best feature: It is whisper-quiet, even on the high setting, and fades into background noise.
So the bottom line here is that this works well even though the app isn’t pretty and isn’t a straight forward setup. In fact, it works so well, as you can see from the app screenshot above, I bought 2 more. One for our attic and one for our ski place to keep the pipes from freezing and allow us to remotely start the heat up before we arrive.
Crane portable space heater Model: EE-8077W specs
- Length: 15″, Height: 14″, Width: 15″
- 4 Quartz Heating Element is clean, safe, and allergy friendly
- 2 Heat Settings: 750W, 1500W with Overheat Protection
- Whisper Quiet, Energy Efficient Infrared Heat is attracted to your body
- Touch LCD Display Panel with Thermostat and Sleep Timer
- Anti-Freeze Function protects pipes in your home
- Child Lock Feature
- Cool Exterior Housing means Safety around pets and children
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