My home office is a converted box room at the back of the house. It faces north. The radiator in it is the smallest radiator I have ever seen — a single panel, roughly the size of a large book, that the previous owners presumably installed as a gesture rather than a genuine attempt at heating. In summer it's fine. In autumn it becomes uncomfortable. By December it is, without exaggeration, the coldest room in the house by a significant margin.
I worked through two winters in that room wearing a fleece over my work clothes, fingerless gloves on my hands, and a blanket over my legs. My partner thought this was funny. I did not think it was funny. I thought it was a situation that had somehow become normalised when it absolutely should not have been.
Why I Finally Did Something About It
The third winter arrived and I made a decision. I was not going to spend another four months being cold in my own home while trying to do my job. I started researching portable heaters with the grim efficiency of someone who has put something off for too long and is now determined to resolve it properly.
My requirements were specific: small enough to sit on or beside my desk without taking over the room, powerful enough to actually make a difference in a north-facing box room, quiet enough that I could use it during calls, and safe enough that I could leave it running while I was focused on work rather than monitoring it constantly. The tip-over protection and overheat protection features of the BZGG 1000W Portable Electric Space Heater were what made me choose it over several similar options. When you're working and not paying attention to the heater, you want to know it's looking after itself.
First Use
It arrived the next day. Setup is immediate — plug in, select your heat setting, done. There are two heat settings, which is all you need: lower for maintaining a comfortable temperature once the room is warm, higher for the initial blast when you first sit down on a cold morning. I positioned it under my desk, angled slightly towards my legs, and turned it on at the higher setting.
Within ten minutes the temperature in the room had shifted noticeably. Within twenty it was genuinely comfortable. I took my fleece off. This was, I want to be clear, a significant moment. I had not taken my fleece off in that room between October and March for two years.
Day to Day
My morning routine now involves turning the heater on when I sit down, switching to the lower setting after about fifteen minutes, and then largely forgetting about it. It runs quietly — there's a gentle hum that you stop noticing within a few minutes, nothing that registers on calls or disrupts concentration. The overheat protection has kicked in once, on a particularly warm day when I'd left it running longer than necessary — it cut out automatically and restarted when it had cooled, exactly as it should.
The tip-over protection has also been tested, inadvertently, by a combination of a trailing cable and my own inattention. It cut out immediately on contact with the floor and restarted when I stood it back up. Both safety features work exactly as described, which sounds like a low bar but is genuinely reassuring when you're relying on something to run unattended for hours at a time.
What It Changed
The obvious answer is: the temperature of my office. But the less obvious answer is more interesting. I am significantly more productive in a room that isn't cold. This is not a surprising finding — there is plenty of research on the relationship between ambient temperature and cognitive performance — but experiencing it directly is different from knowing it abstractly. I finish tasks faster. I take fewer breaks. I am less irritable by mid-afternoon. My partner has noticed. She no longer thinks the situation is funny because the situation no longer exists.
The fleece is in the wardrobe. The fingerless gloves are in a drawer. The blanket has been returned to the bedroom where it belongs. My home office is, for the first time since I started working from it, a room I actually want to be in.
Where to Find It
The BZGG 1000W Portable Electric Space Heater is available now at ALTOE. You'll find it in the Home & Garden, Household Appliances, and Space Heaters collections, and also in the Latest Products drop if you want to see what else has just arrived.
If you are currently wearing a fleece in your own home while trying to work, please stop doing that. The solution is straightforward and it costs less than you think.
— Gareth Llewellyn
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