Debate Over Patio Heaters Gets Alot Hotter Than a Patio Heater

As Summer passes us by one garden product is generating huge amounts of controversy due to its inefficiency and really downright uselessness. Today the Energy Saving Trust will launch a campaign urging retailers to stop selling patio heaters, this comes amid fears ownership of domestic patio heaters is set to double from 1.2 million currently to 2.3 million in the near future according to the Green Barometer. The Green Barometer is the first national index to track the general public attitudes towards green issues.

“We are calling for responsible retailers to re-consider the sale of patio heaters in light of the substantial amount of carbon emissions they produce.
Philip Sellwood, Energy Saving Trust, Chief Executive (Visit Philip's Blog)

This call follows on from growing criticism of the product. In February 2006, a fact finding mission to Dublin's Temple Bar area by Members of Parliament warned that the smoking ban could lead to a growth in the use of patio heaters as way to keep punters who smoke as comfortable as possible.

"What an extraordinary sight greeted me when, with a number of my Parliamentary colleagues and several members of the Dail, I visited a number of pubs to find that all of them fell into one or other of two categories. Either the entire perimeter area was covered with patio heaters and armchairs so that anybody who wanted to go into the admittedly smoke-free pub had to fight their way through a tangible fug of nicotine-soaked air to get into the damned place in the first place, which makes something of a nonsense of it,"
Stephen Pound, Labour Ealing North, Member Of Parliament

At that time Desmond Turner, MP for Brighton Kemptown, called for a complete ban on patio heaters. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The use of patio heaters accounts for about one million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, which immediately cancels out, for instance, the savings made by government changes to vehicle taxations." In a rare occurrence of cross party support Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Norman Baker agreed that patio heaters were a "waste of resources" and "doomed to failure", before adding "Patio heaters are an absurd invention. It is ludicrous that people are trying to heat the open air, as well as being irresponsible in the light of the climate change challenge we face. Instead of reaching for the gas canister people should reach for another jumper instead"

Six months later in September 2006, Martin Horwood a Lib Dem environment spokesman suggested at a conference fringe meeting that inefficient products such as incandescent bulbs ans patio heaters, stating "What about patio heaters? That is a luxury that can easily be taxed extremely heavily."

Commercial heaters are larger and used more often and with nearly 60,000 pubs, 25,000 restaurants and many thousand more hotels, clubs, cafes and bars in the UK, the potential for growth in CO2 emissions from heaters used by the hospitality sector compounds the domestic problem. Each commercial patio heater generates 2.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide on average per year, the equivalent to driving a car for over 6,000 miles. Each domestic patio heater emits 50kg of CO2 per year based on annual usage of 21 hours. With the growth of the industry and more powerful patio heaters this figure is sure to increase.

In June this year London Mayor Ken Livingstone said "Cutting out wasteful use of energy is the most important way in which we can cut emissions in the short term. We need to call a halt towards this trend for wasting energy in this way." At the same time the London Assembly Greens released statistics suggesting the CO2 output of London could increase by more than 20,000 tonnes a year when the ban came into force on 1 July.

Having a quick look online at a leading UK store, I found several brands of patio heaters, the ones I found were electric, and used between 11 and 13kWh, the equivalent to;

1 000 CFL bulbs
4 household kettles
39 televisions
8 household ovens, or
12 household microwaves


That equates to a cost of about £1.21 to £1.43 an hour in electricity costs and 5.7kg - 6.8kg of CO2 emissions per hour of use. In an evening that could work out to be an expensive garden party. Businesses that offer patio heaters are not only incurring huge financial overheads from using these devices, which ultimately will be passed on to the consumer who benefit very little from their use. Having had the unfortunate opportunity to be eating al fresco at an Italian restaurant recently I was subjected to two patio heaters next to my table, I was cold before they were turned on, I was still cold after, in all honesty the product is irrational, the concept delusional and in practice useless. It's like turning the heating on in your house only to open all the windows and doors, or cooking in an oven with the door open. Maybe the solution is before us, rather than gas and electric patio heaters maybe we need more conventional and environmentally friendly biomass patio heaters at least that way they are carbon neutral.

So before you go and splash out a few hundred pounds on a patio heater, think of the long term costs to your pocket and the environment.