Verdict

This compact heater looks so good you could leave it out on display. It's got some great features, too, and is well protected against accidents. Unfortunately, the VonHaus 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater is not especially effective, meaning it's suitable only for smaller bedrooms or lounges, perhaps even working as an additional heat source to existing radiators.

Pros

• Looks great
• Plenty of features
• Remote control
• Easily portable
• Fan-only mode

Cons

• Weak fans
• Not especially effective
• Won't work with smart controls

This two kilowatt (kW) fan heater takes a boring home appliance and dresses it up like the latest technology. The VonHaus 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater looks fantastic, and comes with a full set of features including temperature and remote control, an eight-hour timer, and oscillation. It’s compact and light, so you can easily move it around the home, and the price is keen too. What’s the downside? We put it through our usual tests to see if we could find one. 

• Best electric heaters

VonHaus 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater – What you need to know

• Heater performance – Despite a fan-only mode, this heater’s dual fans won’t stir up much of a breeze. The heating effect is modest, too
• Sound performance – While each fan is quiet, the two together interact to make a gentle thrum. It’s inoffensive, but may be hard to background.
• Use and features – Loads of useful features and a remote control make this supremely convenient and easy to use.

VonHaus 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater Design – Smarter than your average fan heater

If you think of fan heaters as beige boxes that live in the loft until a snowy winter, VonHaus is out to make you think again. The descriptively named 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater looks more like a state-of-the-art speaker and wouldn’t look out of place next to an expensive TV or audio set-up. About as tall as two books laid end-to-end, this heater is shallow, easily fitting onto a desktop or even a bookshelf.

This heater looks more like a high-end speaker

This fan heater has a slim base, on top of which the main body can oscillate, although only through about 80 degrees. At the top of the front panel there’s a dark plastic section which lights up in use to confirm the room temperature and the selected functions. These are controlled by a row of touch buttons on the top panel, although these seem to run in the opposite order to what we’d expect, with the important buttons, like power and the heat control, over on the right.

At the rear, an easily-removed plastic grille covers a washable air filter. There’s a mechanical on/off switch and a carry handle, but no compartment for the infra-red remote control. This duplicates all of the heater buttons, although confusingly it uses different icons for some of them.

The remote control gives you the same features as on the fan but it has different icons

VonHaus 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater Features – Feature rich and easy to use

VonHaus hasn’t skimped when it comes to features. Aside from remote control and oscillation, this heater has a fan-only mode and two heat settings. You can select these manually, or dial-up a target temperature and have the heater intelligently switch power levels so as not to overshoot it. It works quite well, although the thermostat is optimistic by a couple of degrees, and the heater slightly too keen to stick to the lower heat setting. The warmth comes from a positive temperature coefficient (PTC) ceramic element, which heats up extremely quickly.

This heater has an eight-hour countdown timer, which you could use in combination with the thermostat to maintain a comfortable temperature while you fall asleep. It’s also fitted with overheat protection and a tip-over switch, quickly shutting down the moment it’s bumped. Together these features make it comparatively safe to have around children or pets, but you should always use caution. When switched on at the mains this heater always defaults to standby mode, so it’s not suitable for use with a smart socket.

VonHaus 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater Performance – Gentle breeze, gentle heat

The two fans only operate at one speed, designed to gently circulate air than ruffle your feathers. Even from just 15cm away the airflow was below the 0.8 metres per second threshold of our anemometer. There’s enough breeze to help cool you at a desk in summer, but not enough to effectively circulate heat around a bigger room. Compounding the problem, the fan speed drops slightly on low heat, and significantly on the highest setting.

There’s not much noise from the heater’s gentle fans, but at times their fractionally different speeds create a slight thrumming that’s less easy to background. At 15cm we measured sound at 47.5dB, and by a metre this had fallen to just 29.9dB.

Connecting a power meter revealed that this heater consumes nine watts in fan-only mode, and a disappointing 3W doing nothing – it’s a good idea to turn it off with the physical switch rather than leaving it on standby for any length of time. It displays typical behaviour for a PTC heater, with a high peak when the elements first switch on, quickly settling to a steady 2kW on full power and 1.1kW on the lower setting. Timed on full power over 30 minutes, it consumed 1.01 kilowatt hours, which typically costs around 15p.

Sadly, the VonHaus 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater isn’t especially effective. We conducted a 30 minute test on a comparatively warm 15℃ afternoon. The starting room temperature, as measured by two thermostats on either side of our 48 cubic-metre bedroom, was an almost balmy average of 21.5℃, and yet at full power the heater could only raise this to 22.4℃.

Should you buy the VonHaus 2000W Oscillating Fan Heater

This isn’t a heater for larger rooms or poorly insulated houses. With a minimum thermostat setting of 10℃ it’s not ideal for frost-prevention, and its electronic controls mean you can’t use it with an external timer or smart switch.

However, this is a well-specified product for the price, with good safety protections, a great range of features and a two-year warranty. More than anything it looks nothing like the fan heaters of old, and genuinely wouldn’t seem out of place alongside more expensive technology or furnishings in a modern, well-insulated home. If you want a great looking fan heater and can live with sub-par heating, this is a good choice.

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