Dreo Atom 316 Review
A tiny fan heater that's much more effective than you'd expect
Verdict
The Dreo Atom 316 may be cheap and tiny, but it’s surprisingly effective, kicking out enough heat to get even medium-sized rooms up to temperature in a hurry. If you’re expecting a powerful blast of hot air, you’ll be disappointed by its rather limited fan, but it does enough to circulate the heat – and it’s impressively quiet. This heater’s controls could certainly be improved, but it otherwise looks and feels like a significantly more expensive product than it is. If you want a cheap, portable, effective room heater, this is a great choice.
Pros
- Tiny and very portable
- Effective heating
- Doesn’t look or feel cheap
Cons
- Controls could be improved
Key Features
- TypeThis is a fan heater with onboard thermostat.
- Temperature controlAdjustable thermostat for precision heating.
Introduction
The Dreo Atom 316 is one of the smallest fan heaters you’ll find – it’s only the size of a small bathroom pedal bin. Despite this, it’s rated at a decent 1.5kW, which ought to be enough to take the chill off even a medium-sized room.
This heater is cheap, and it’s fairly basic. There are no smart controls, and it has just a simple display. It’s well protected, though, with a child lock, and protection against overheating or tipping over.
Design and features
- Small and smart
- Basic controls
- Good safety protection
The Dreo Atom 316 is a small and light cylinder, weighing only 1.3kg. With a moulded carry handle at the back, it’s extremely easy to move around – even when it’s still warm.
It doesn’t look at all like a cheap device. The front half is wrapped in a black steel mesh through which it blows out hot air, and while the rest is plastic, it feels thick and well screwed together.
The design is finished nicely with a silver plastic ring around the top. At first, it’s hard to see where the controls are, but plug in the heater, and you’ll see a basic display showing the current mode or heat level.
The controls themselves are a group of five touch-sensitive buttons concealed on the top panel. I wish I could say that these also light up, or are highlighted in any way, but they’re simply carved into the panel – and almost invisible in anything other than slanting light.
This could be a real issue, especially for anyone with poor eyesight. I needed to move the heater around or use my mobile phone torch to read its control markings. Despite being traced out by indentations in the plastic, the buttons aren’t tactile enough that you can recognise them by touch. Fortunately, the Atom 316 remembers the last mode you had it set to, so once you’ve got it tweaked to your liking, you might not need to use anything but the power button, which is the one nearest the front.
Once you find them, the controls let you choose from manual mode, where you can set one of three heat levels, or Eco, where you set a target temperature from 5-35°C, and Atom 316 varies its output to maintain it. In each, the fan speed varies with the amount of heat being produced, using full speed at full heat and low speed on the lowest heat. There’s a third, fan-only mode, where the fan runs only at its fastest speed.
The Dreo Atom 316 defaults to standby if you turn it off and then on at the socket, so you can’t schedule it using a smart plug. It has a built-in off-timer, available in one-hour increments up to 12 hours. Mercifully, you can also turn off its button beep if you want to. My one criticism of its basic display is that, in manual mode, the lowest heat setting is shown as ‘H1’. This looks identical to ‘HI’, which could be confused for full power.
This is a well-protected heater. While its metal output mesh does get very hot in use, the fan runs on for 30 seconds after heating finishes to take the remaining heat out of it. It has tip-over protection, with power being cut immediately should you knock it over.
There’s also a child lock, although I wouldn’t recommend you leave young children unsupervised around any heater. One final safety feature is a 24-hour cutoff, which helps if you tend to forget to switch things off – note that if you want this feature, it’s off by default.
Performance
- Surprisingly effective heating
- Accurate thermostat
- Quiet in use
I wasn’t expecting a powerful blast from the Dreo Atom 316, but even at full speed its fan wasn’t strong enough to stir up an appreciable breeze. Just 15cm away from the output, there wasn’t enough air movement to coax my anemometer above its 0.9 metres per second minimum speed.
The Dreo Atom 316 certainly isn’t a substitute for a cooling fan, then, but its limp fan isn’t so much of an issue in heating mode, where it just needs to do enough to circulate warm air. Here, the Atom 316 performed brilliantly for such a small device. On its maximum setting, it lifted the air temperature of a medium-sized bedroom from 17.6°C to 22.4°C within just 30 minutes. After an hour, this had reached 23.1°C.
I was even more impressed by the Atom 316’s ability to warm up the fabric of a room. Over the same test it lifted the temperature recorded by my Tado smart radiator thermostat from 16.6°C to 18.8°C, and then on to 19.5°C after an hour. With this thermostat positioned well away from the heater, and shielded by a large desk, this level of warming is better than I’ve measured from convector heaters, and suggests that heat from the Atom 316 was well distributed about the room.
By keeping the fan speed low, Dreo has managed to avoid the noise I’d usually expect from a small fan working hard. At its maximum setting, I measured a sound output of just 47.9dB from 15cm away and 44dB from a metre. That’s quiet enough for some people to sleep through and certainly not enough that you’d need to turn up the TV or radio.
This heater uses a ceramic positive temperature coefficient (PTC) element, which fully heats up in less than 10 seconds, providing near-instant heat. Like all PTC elements, the initial phase is very power hungry, with the heater recording a momentary peak of up to 2.4 kilowatts (kW), before settling down to just below its rated 1.5kW. Heating constantly, the Atom 316 used 0.79 kilowatt hours (kWh) over 30 minutes and 1.5kWh over one hour.
In practice, the Atom 316 could use considerably less than this if you stick to its lower power settings: the lowest consumes just over 1kW, while the middle setting uses just less than 1.4kW. I particularly liked its Eco mode, in which it works at full power until it approaches your set temperature, then lowers its heating effort as it gets closer. When it gets to the target temperature, it’ll switch off until the room temperature starts to fall again. This could save a little power, but just as usefully it helps prevent overheating.
I used Eco mode to reach and maintain a room temperature of 21°C, in a room with a starting air temperature of 18.4°C. While the Atom 316 doesn’t display a detected room temperature, it seemed accurate, heating the room to just over 21°C before shutting itself down, and restarting as the air temperature dropped just below 20°C.
After 30 minutes in this mode the Atom 316 had consumed a very reasonable 0.27kWh, and after an hour it had got through 0.51kWh. That’s equivalent to 15p at the January 2024 price cap of 29p per kWh, and suggests that in a well-insulated room this heater could prove reasonably affordable to run.
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Should you buy it?
You want a cheap, quiet, stylish and effective heater
The Dreo Atom 316 is cheap, but it doesn’t look it. It has a decent set of features and feels solid and well-made. It also performs well, delivering effective heat without making a massive racket. It’s a great choice for heating small and even medium-sized rooms.
You want a heater with more features
This heater goes without smart controls, or energy-saving features like open window detection. If you need them, you should budget to pay more. It also doesn’t have the power to heat a big room, or smaller rooms that are draughty or badly insulated.
Final Thoughts
If you want a cheap fan heater, the Dreo Atom could be perfect. It looks good, is easy to carry around, and has all the basic features you’re likely to need. With the exception of its invisible controls it’s also very easy to live with, making little noise, running reasonably efficiently, and in Eco mode heating to a fairly constant temperature.
If you want a fan heater with smart controls, you should consider an alternative like the TCP Smart Heating Fan Heater Mini. However, if you just want something basic and effective, the Dreo Atom 316 is a great value choice.
How we test
Unlike other sites, we test every heater we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main heater for the review period
We measure the fan speed (if available) using an anemometer so that we can accurately compare performance between models
We measure the heat output of the fan and its effect on our test lab.
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FAQs
This heater is protected against overheating and being knocked over. Dreo says it’s also made from flame-retardant materials, and has an ‘enhanced safety plug’.
The Atom 316 is rated at 1,500 watts (1.5kW), so during an hour on full power it will use 1.5 kilowatt hours, worth 43p at January 2024 prices. However, used in Eco mode with a sensible target temperature it’s likely to use significantly less.
Full specs
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Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
