Those who opt for electric heaters over central heating could end up paying more on their energy bills.
Consumers should also be cautious when they see devices that claim to heat a room while using less electricity than other models - such as fan heaters or plug in oil-filled radiators.
Greg Foot, who hosts the Radio 4 Sliced Bread podcast, wanted to find out if any one portable electric heater actually saved money.
The podcast host spoke to a listener named Ken from Aberdeen who wanted to know whether heater ads that claim to "save you a fortune heating your homes" were worth listening to.
Greg had a look for himself and found that some manufacturers were claiming that their devices will heat up any room using "30 percent less energy" than other models.
He then teamed up with the Research and Development team at Octopus Energy to find out which portable electric heater is the most energy efficient.
After comparing a ceramic heater, convection heater, a fan heater and an oil-filled radiator, it was found that they all cost a similar amount of money to run.
The main difference between the devices was the speed at which they would heat the house, but those which heated rooms faster were more expensive - and so didn't save consumers money.
Greg explained: "If you want to heat up the whole room, each and every one of these devices is going to cost pretty much the same amount to do it."
This comes after the consumer experts at Which? found that electric heaters are unlikely to be cost-effective compared to central heating over long periods of time.
They said that portable heaters are great at providing a quick heating fix for a short time, or if your central heating system isn’t working. But it’ll take a portable heater between 15 to 30 minutes to raise the temperature of a medium-sized room by 10ºC at full blast.
If you pay for energy by the unit and with the current price cap, electricity is much more expensive than gas – so be prudent if using an electric heater in place of gas.
If you’re on a standard variable tariff, the average unit price for dual fuel customers is 34p per/kWh for electricity and 10.3p per/kWh for gas.
That means that a 2kW portable heater at its full output would use 34p of electricity every half an hour.
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