Forced air heaters are well known in the art and usually comprise a fan or blower contained in a housing with a heat exchanger of either the electrical type or the conduit type through which hot water or steam is circulated.
The conduit type of forced air heater has a large heating capacity and is therefore usually a permenant installation which lacks portability, whereas the electrical type of forced air heaters are usually more portable, but lack the large heating capacity of the conduit types.
The present invention is intended for home use and takes advantage of the fact that most homes are provided with high capacity heating systems which depend on convection or radiation for the distribution of heated air, the systems usually being controlled by a centrally located thermostat, which is responsive to the temperature in the immediate vicinity of the thermostat, the entire system being turned on and off according to that temperature.
This type of operation of most home heating systems gives rise to the problem of some rooms being underheated while others are overheated, causing the system to operate inefficiently, especially since individual rooms cannot be independently controlled and it is complicated and expensive to provide heat-output control for an individual space heater which is permanently emplaced.
The heating requirements of any given room are not necessarily identical to those of another room, the differences depending on the number of windows, whether or not they are facing the prevailing winds and the amount of sunlight they receive, and the needs of the user.
It can be argued that the answer to this problem is to turn the heat off in those rooms which are usually warmer while leaving the heat on in the colder rooms. The drawback with this approach is that the conditions which make some rooms warmer than others are changable, so that if a normally warmer room is deprived of heat from the central system and the conditions which make that room normally warmer change, the heat in that room will have to be turned on, causing an imbalance in the system and a greater consumption of fuel, not to mention the inconvenience of having to turn the heat on and off.