Let’s face it, Britain has held off the shivers and cold weather for as long as it could. With record warm temperatures in October, and November so far still above the seasonal averages, we can’t do the usual Brit thing and moan about the weather.
But with winter now firmly on its way and a cold snap predicted sooner rather than later, it’s time to wrap up and get the heating cranked up.
Which is where the Dyson Hot comes in. I’ve been playing with one of these interesting looking gadgets for a few weeks now.
With the look of the bladeless Dyson Air Multiplier fan – which has won plenty of plaudits – the Hot has a space-age design to it. Visitors to our house can’t believe it when they find out it’s actually a heater.
It’s packed with some space-age technology too but we will come to that later, the crucial question for now is… does it work?
Well the answer is an emphatic yes! With a temperature control of up to 37°C, the Hot Fan lives up to its name.
Stand in front of it and it feels as if cold air is blowing out, causing my wife to moan that I’m just making the room feel colder.
But give it a few minutes and things do begin to get toasty in all corners of the room, although for bigger ones I’ve found cranking it up to 37°C gives the fastest warming results.
One thing the Dyson Hot is not, though, is cheap. It costs around £270, four or five times as much as other fan heaters that could do the job well enough.
What makes this one remarkable though is it doesn’t get too hot to touch and while we certainly wouldn’t recommend it, if a child decided to put their hand through the bladeless opening, no harm should come to them - unlike the burn I suffered as a kid from a traditional fan heater.
The Dyson Hot can be set anywhere between one and 37°C and will sense when the room has hit the temperature you’ve selected. It will then turn off and come back on should the room start to get colder and the temperature begin to fall.
With traditional fan or electric radiator-style heaters, dust can cause a horrid pong – but the Dyson Hot is designed to avoid this.
Now, how does it work? Like the Air Multiplier and similar to the Dyson Airblade hand-dryers you see in pubs and restaurants, air gets drawn in from the outside using technology found in a jet engine and is then pumped back out mixed with the surrounding cold air to make it six times as powerful.
Remarkably, the heating happens in a space just 2.5mm wide.
But while it might oscillate, it might have a remote control, it might be totally a breeze to put together in just a few part clicks, however you look at it, you can’t get away from how costly this product is.
The company counters that the Dyson Hot allows you to also cool a room as well as heat one, making it twice as useful as a conventional fan heater. But at four or five times the cost, that might not be enough.
So if you can afford it, it’s a worthy purchase. But it might be cheaper to just turn the thermostat on your central heating up a degree or two or have it on for longer.
Of course, you’re then potentially warming more than just the one room but with many pensioners struggling to pay their fuel bills, splashing such a large amount of cash on the Dyson Hot is certainly an extravagance.
But then it is a stylish extravagance that’ll keep you nice and snug for many winters to come.
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