Have you used an infrared panel heater?

We are building a passive solar tire bale house. We've heard from others who have installed wood stoves in similar houses who never use them because the house is plenty warm enough. Even though we aren't yet insulated, still have openings in our unfinished walls, and have only a fraction of our eventual thermal mass in, the unfinished house shell interior has been staying in the 40-60 degree range in spite of an unusual (in our area) 9-day cold snap with nights in the single digits to low 20s.

So we will save the woodburning for outside, and are looking for efficient space heaters for those times when we do need to take the edge off indoors.

Panel infrared heaters sound good to us on paper, but we have no experience with them. Here's an article on them. Most electric space heaters are 1500 watts and up; even dinky ones. Infrared panels are 300-750 and up, and claim good coverage even at those smaller sizes. I haven't been able to find a lot of info on infrared panels beyond that from manufacturers. But it sounds like for our 1000 sq ft house, a couple of infrared panels might be enough to give us the heat we'd need on occasion, or for a couple hours on cold nights like those we've been having.

Do any of you have experience with these, or other suggestions for this purpose?

It depends on what you"re trying to do. If you want to create a small warm nest in a cold spell, they may work well for you.

It's not a lot of heat, realistically. 1500 W is just over 5000 BTU. For comparison purposes, my old single burner backpacking stoves produced somewhere around 8000-10000 BTU-- enough to boil 2 litres of water for tea and cook all regulation meals.

Much depends on the individual.  I have encountered people who love them. I have used one and would rather go without.  But my experience was in an office setting where I was on the move for much of the day.

I have no experience with the infrared panels.

What Douglas said would be my expectations.

We have an infrared heater like the ones that have a wooden case which makes them look like a piece of furniture.

It is the only heat we have for 1/2 of my house, the bedroom.

Our outside temps have been down to - 5 degrees and it still worked for us.

If I were trying to heat a whole house I would have at least one for every room.

I work at a dam and so we produce a lot of electricity for the grid so we use electric heaters a lot.

Radiant panel heaters work incredibly well

We are considering taking out our oil furnace for the shop and office and just using them

Yesterday we used a single 1500 watt radiant heater in our 3 bay shop and within an hour it was considerably warmer. Not bad for a $300 heater

I’m thinking about putting one in my house

We have central heat in the front of our house but have the 400 watt infared panel heaters in the back bedrooms and office.  They do not really heat the room but give the illusion of warming the room.  It you sit in front of the one at the desk you can be comfortable in a 55 degree room.  We put them at the head the beds angled down at the bed and you are warm in bed but the room is still cold when you get up.  They use a lot less power to keep you comfortable in a given space but are not for actually heating an area.  We turn them off when not needed and they heat up in about 3-4 minutes when needed.