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Honeywell HZ519 Baseboard Heater Product HZ519 Key FeaturesType BaseboardPower Source ElectricHeating Levels 1 Leve...

Nice toasty heater - Honeywell HZ519 Baseboard Heater A few years ago I purchase a Honeywell heater but it failed to work this year and I returned it to Home Depot. Th...

This was my last attempt to find a good heater. I was sold on the baseboard heater design after a very effective unit from Lasko, which regrettably made way too much noise and constantly woke me up. I was worried that this Honeywell might have the same problem, but decided to give it a try anyway.

It was actually slightly more expensive than the Lasko, and Honeywell is a brand that I had heard of before (my dad even used to work with them for a while). I paid about $50 for it at Home Depot.

Installation was simple - take it out of the box, plug it in, set the temperature - done! There were a few differences here from the Lasko model. The good better thing is that there are separate buttons to set the temperature up or down, which is much better than having to cycle in just one direction.

The bad problems with the set up are a few more though. The display is quite big, but it is not back lit, so viewing it in the dark is requires a flash light or something. The other mis fortunate flaw is the single temperature readout. The Lasko heater showed both the room temperature and the set temperature on the display at the same time. The Honeywell only shows the room temperature, and the only way to see the set one is to change it with the up or down buttons, during which the readout blinks with the given preset.

While all these flaws are annoying, they would be trivial if the performance was satisfactory. My first reaction was very optimistic, because the heater appeared to be dead silent. I have to say, as far as noise is concerned this heater delivers completely.

My worries started shortly after turning it on though, because I didn’t feel any heat flow coming from it. I thought to myself “there’s a reason why it’s so quiet, it’s just broken”. But getting close to it and touching the metal surface proved that the heater was in fact working, but for whatever reason the heat just didn’t seem to spread around much.

It is amazing how two heaters with completely equal specifications and a very similar design could have such different performance. While the Lasko needed about 14 minutes to raise the temperature in my apartment from 60 to about 68 degrees, the Honeywell struggled to make any noticeable difference even after an hour. Eventually after a couple of hours, and with the help of the ceiling fan, the display did show up an increase of the room temperature of about 4 degrees, but just like all the previous heaters I had tried before the Lasko, it could not bring the temperature in my room above 68 degrees.

The situation though turned out to be even worse than I thought. Even though the display said 68, it felt cold, much colder. I spent about two weeks thinking that I am just too cold blooded, but then it occurred to me that the heater’s thermometer might not be accurate. I finally took the kitchen thermometer to my room and indeed it measured 65 degrees, while the Honeywell was showing 68.

At first I was very disappointed, but soon it turned out to be for the best. Apparently as far as the major retailers are concerned the winter season ends in January, and that’s when the big clearance sales begin. Browsing the Lowe’s web site I saw that my previous Lasko heater was on sale for $19. That’s a difference of $30 and I thought that for $20 I could live with the noises.

I returned the Honeywell and bought a new Lasko heater. I am very happy to report that this one makes a lot less noise than the first one. It is not as silent as the Honeywell, but heats much better, has a better display, cost me more than half less, and seems to be much more accurate.

Before I forget, two other features of the Honeywell worth mentioning. It has a built in timer to shut off the heater at a preset time up to 10 hours on 1-hour-increments. It also has a little warning on the metal green, which turns red when the metal gets hot, and goes black when it cools of. It’s quite silly, but I guess you can never make something “too safe”.

There are also two heating modes - Max, and auto, but they do not affect the wattage or anything, the only difference is that in the max mode it keeps running until it is turned off or the room temperature reaches 85 degrees, while the auto mode shuts it off at the preselected temperature from 60 to 85 degrees.

I still find the baseboard heater design very appealing, but this Honeywell model is a poor execution of the concept.

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