Heater running at 1600 watts

[William Snyder]

I recently purchased a space heater and before using it full time I plugged in my watt meter to see how many watts and amps it pulled. I was not happy to see 1600 watts at 13.1 amps which is above code I believe. Should I return it? It seems unsafe to run for 8 hours or so on high

 

[littlespark]

It’s fine.

Take your watts, divide by the amps and you should get whatever voltage is coming out your outlet.
1600/13.1 is 122 volts roughly. Is that expected?

Saying that, a household plugin energy monitor may not be very accurate. It will only give a rough reading which could be off by a few percent.


A heater like this will only draw its full load when heating up from cold. Once it reaches a certain temperature, it will shut off… and only click back in when the temperature drops again.

Many heaters now come with adjustable thermostats, high/low settings and a built in timeclock…

 

[James]

Us outlets are rated at 15 or 20A from what I can see.
So your heater should be ok on either type.