Bring on the cold weather. The office here at Ranchero Indebto has a brand-new bargain-priced electric fireplace! How the heck did that happen, you ask? I never thought I’d own an electric fireplace … they’re tacky, or so I thought. Lo and behold, my search for a suitable space heater ended the minute we saw this charming little oak beauty on sale for half price at Lowes.

I’ve been freezing my tail off in our home office for years. We’ve been lucky this winter but it was only a matter of time until the crazy warm weather ended. Our twenty-year-old oil filled portable radiator never really warmed the room up. If I had a dollar for every time I defrosted my hands over the computer monitors, I’d be able to take the rest of the month off and head up to Killington.

While I’d still like to spend the rest of the month in Vermont, our new electric fireplace has banished the cold from the office air. (I gave serious thought to ordering a USB-heated mouse, but I didn’t think it would add much to the ambiance of the office … even though the yellow model might go nicely with our exercise ball/chair.)

The unusually warm winter here on the east coast has been kind to our heating oil bills. It’s also left scores of electric fireplaces and snow throwers collecting dust at home centers and hardware stores. The half-price deal we scored on our little electric fireplace was too good to pass up.

We’ll see what the electric fireplace does to our electric bill next month. In the meantime, I’m going to plug it into the watt hour meter to get an idea of how much juice it consumes …

[tags]electric fireplace, space heater[/tags]