Wait, What Are We Heating Again?
Someone asked me the other day why I’m only writing about air heaters. Their water heater burns natural gas and I ought to be talking about those as well.
While this person’s state was in accurate, I do take their point. Natural gas bruning water heaters are the most common way to provide hot showers in the United States. Mea culpa. I oughtn’t be so neglectful because I value those hot showers more than a warm house, probably! But the truth is I find the area kind of, well, boring. There aren’t nearly so many different options concerning water heaters as there are people heaters. Go find some other blog if you want to talk about them, we’re sticking to the sexy stuff here.
Back to the inaccuracy I mentioned, though. I haven’t really been talking about air heaters at all, I’ve been talking about people heaters. It is true that many gas heaters acheive their people heating goal by heating air that then gets moved around (this is called convection heating). Central air heating is an obvious example of this and so are space heaters that have electric blowers attached to them. But many heaters don’t rely on heating the air at all. Remember the post about outdoor gas heaters? Right. Radiant heaters. And radiant heaters work indoors as well. Indoor space heaters that are only designed to heat a smaller area can operate soley radiant heat. The nice thing about them is that they are quiet. All you can hear is (sometimes) the gentle hiss of gas flowing to the burner and the pleasant pings of the metal pieces expanding and contracting.
I suppose you could consider gas ranges and ovens to be food gas heaters too if you really want to be pedantic about it!