Review: Sensa Cribside Heater

Babies get everything: free food, lots of attention, near-universal acclaim. And now, they get a feature I've been looking for from space heaters ever since I started testing them.

Most space heaters have a problem so obvious it should feel embarrassing to everyone involved. Cashiers should say, “I'm sorry,” as they take the money. Customers should feel ashamed as they fork it over. The problem is this: The thermostat used to regulate the device is located inside the space heater, often within inches of a very hot heating element. This does not lead to good results.

Apparently it took a baby to solve the problem. Or at least, it took a space heater made for babies. The Sensa Cribside, from Vornado's baby line of heaters and fans, is the first resistance space heater I've tested that comes with a separate, external temperature sensor. And so the room temperature registered by the heater is the actual temperature in the room—in this case, right by the crib where the baby sleeps.

The Sensa, like some other Vornado space heaters that rank among our picks for the best space heaters around, is a quite good space heater. It's wonderfully quiet, and Vornado's “vortex” technology—basically a fan rotating into a spiral of plastic that's oriented the opposite way—tends to move hot air silently and evenly, with only the barest breeze. My decibel meter barely budged beyond levels denoted “background noise.”

But the real mind-blower is that the sensor is accurate. The temperature measured by Sensa's remote sensor stayed within a degree of the temperature measured by a digital thermometer placed right next to it, a vanishingly rare quality among dozens of portable space heaters I've tested. When the room temperature reached the prescribed point, the Sensa slowed its roll, then switched to a fan. Holy cow: a functional space-heater thermostat.

I looked in vain, and no other Vornado heater I could find offers an external sensor like this. Only the Sensa, for babies. Babies get everything.

Heaters for Tots

On this note, caveats are in order. Space heater safety has improved considerably over the decades, and this Sensa contains far more fail-safes than most. For as long as they keep their jobs, your helpful federal consumer safety experts do warn against leaving a space heater unattended in a baby's room.

Sensa's thermostat works well, and the device also boasts a programmable shutoff timer so it won't run indefinitely. But the risk of hyperthermia is real. And so each parent must find their own comfort level, in their own circumstances. (Here are some other helpful space-heater safety tips.)

The Sensa contains a number of other key safety features clearly designed with tots and toddler-proofing in mind. The tip-over sensor is immediate, and quite sensitive, leading to shutoff at the barest wobble. If the Sensa is off, one must press a child-safe unlock button for three full seconds before the device can be turned back on. Each edge and side is rounded, the plastic a bit thick.

The Sensa is also not overly powerful: It's 1,200 watts, as compared to the 1,500 watts commanded by most other space heaters. This makes sense if your priority is making sure that the Sensa doesn't overheat a room, nor burn a toddler's curious finger. I stuck my hand across the whole vent of a Sensa with the heat on high and felt, at worst, mild discomfort at my knuckles after a minute. The rest of the device's surface remains cool.

So far, so good. But since we're in the $150 price range on a space heater, one could also ask that Vornado join the modern era of phone apps and remote monitoring. Many of the WIRED gear team's favorite baby monitors will happily relay a crib room's temperature to a parent's waiting phone. It's not too much to ask that the sensor for a baby heater might also be Wi-Fi enabled. If Baby's cold, or hot, inquiring dads want to know.

Another quibble: When the sensor is paired with the device, it turns on a bright green pinpoint light on the Sensa's face, which doesn't turn off and might distract a tot at night.

A Baby Is Like the Moon Landing

I should admit, however, I didn't actually test the Sensa on behalf of infants. Same as most people, I like babies. And I hope all babies sleep well, at a stable room temperature, and dream of mango puree and their mother's loving smile. But space heaters in rooms where babies sleep make me privately nervous. I'd more likely use the Sensa in a house with a roaming toddler.

What interests me most about the Sensa is a good idea I'd like to see more of: that remote temperature sensor. Vornado heater thermostats already tend to be better than those on most brands. But Sensa's external sensor remains the only Vornado thermostat I've tested that's accurate within a single degree Fahrenheit.

I'm willing to accept that extreme circumstances lead to innovation. The space program gave us the Dustbuster, and arguably the camera phone. The microwave oven was inspired by tech used for military radar. The fears and aspirations of parenthood seem just as extreme, and just as forbidding, as a foreign war or a journey into the endless void. And so maybe it took a baby to give us a working space heater thermostat.

But it's time to bring paired external temperature sensors into more widespread use. An accurate thermostat lowers energy usage considerably, reduces annoying cycling of heat modes, and helps keep room temperature stable at a chosen temperature.

Almost none of the many portable space heaters I've tested can consistently measure room temp within even a few degrees of accuracy. No one would ever measure a building's temperature from inside the boiler room, let alone the boiler itself. But somehow we've all come to accept that the thermostat on your average space heater is a house joke, or an exercise in forgiveness.

We should be less forgiving. An external temperature sensor is self-evidently a good idea, for adults as well as children. Vornado has proven it can make a space heater with an accurate external thermostat. Now I'd love one without a child lock.