More Hot Air: The Original Sunheat

In last Sunday's USA Weekend magazine (the poor cousin of Parade magazine), there was an ad for yet another space heater, this time "The Original Sunheat."

This ad is much more clever than the ones for EdenPure or the Amish mantle doodad, for a couple of reasons:

• It doesn't try so hard. There are no models dressed as Amish girls or happy homeowners toasting their toes in front of the heater. It looks very no-nonsense, communicating a no-frills approach. Hey, I thought, this one might actual be a decent buy.
• It has a Better Business Bureau logo prominently located in the top right corner
• It clearly tells you what company is responsible for the product, gives their location (Grand Island, Nebraska -- about as "real America" as you can get!) and closes with "Family Owned Since 1954."

As I learned earlier from Karen Youso's first and second columns on space heater topics in the Star Tribune, you can buy one of three heaters rated as best by Consumer Reports for under $100. So I set off to see how much this honest-looking Sunheat box cost.

I was quickly disappointed, I'm sorry to say. Looking at the Sunheat website, I found the model shown in the ad in their online store for almost $680. I could pay for a lot of natural gas instead for that amount!

So what about that Better Business Bureau logo? They endorse the company behind Sunheat, right?

Well, no. According to their page on the Nebraska BBB site, T&R Distributing, the sellers of Sunheat, are "BBB accredited," which means they will answer complaints made to the BBB and try to rectify them. There have been 32 complaints in the last three years, some rectified, but many dropped because the customer did not follow through.

Just to clear things up, the BBB site states: "As a matter of policy, BBB does not endorse any product, service or business."

Accreditation is obviously a step up from the complete dishonesty of Arthur Middleton company and its Universal Media Syndicate, promoters of the Amish heaters and other scams, but it doesn't absolve T&R for selling a severely over-priced product... which the BBB site notes is made in China, so it's not like our money would be creating living wage manufacturing jobs down there in Grand Island, Nebraska.

There's a whole lot of shamelessness to go around in the space heater racket, stretching from Nebraska to the "Amish" in Ohio to Michigan's EdenPure.

And by the way -- if you really want to buy a space heater, the top-rated, affordable brands from the Consumer Reports story are Honeywell, Holmes and DeLonghi.