Everhot Electric Stove

Verdict

The Everhot Electric Stove isn’t your standard room heater, it’s a focal point for a living room, garden room, or any other space where you might want to dial up the hygge. It takes ages to heat and ages to cool down, and it looks like it could have been made in the 1950s, but choose the right colour, and it’ll complement almost any interior. Best of all, it works with smart plugs and solar heat diverters, potentially making it a far greener choice than an oil or log burner.

Introduction

Everhot’s Electric Stove looks exactly like a shrunken version of the company’s full-sized range of ovens, which it essentially is.

Built from a heavy steel body with a cast iron door, it’s finished in your choice of 21 colours. Inside you’ll find a small oven space lined in stainless steel, but if you don’t need this you can save money and buy the Everhot Electric Heater, which is otherwise identical.

This is an expensive heater, designed to add a touch of class and provide a talking point in any space where people might want to relax. It’s ideally suited to anywhere you might otherwise put an oil or wood-burning stove but, of course, it doesn’t need a flue and won’t fall foul of any Smoke Control Areas. The stove’s official 1.5 kilowatt (kW) heat rating isn’t enough to heat a very big or badly insulated room, but when used as a second heat source, it will help keep a living room toasty.

This heater is only about the size of a small coffee table, but it requires up to 250mm clearance on either side. Much of the heat emerges from a vent at the top which you must keep clear, so you’ll need to think carefully about exactly where you’ll put it. While it can go on thinner carpets and fire-resistant hard floors, it weighs a mighty 50 kilos – getting it upstairs or carrying it out to a garden room is definitely a two-person job.

Design and features

• Stunning design and build quality
• Basic controls
• Surfaces get very hot to touch

Unpack the Everhot Electric Stove and you’ll almost certainly want to spend a few minutes just looking at it. My tangerine example was absolutely beautifully made, with a stunning, uniform gloss finish that would contrast perfectly with a slate hearth or a dark matte wall. The door has a high quality steel handle, and closes with the sort of cushioned thunk you get in a limousine.

On the top panel, a machined aluminium heat vent adds some lovely detail.

Opening the door reveals this oven’s 20-litre baking space. Inside there’s a single shelf big enough for a round of potatoes or a large-ish casserole. Its 10-kilo maximum weight limit ought to be plenty. Everhot says it’s suitable for occasional cooking, but it can’t be controlled independently of the heater itself: if you want to bake, you’ll also need to heat.

This oven has just two controls, both of which feel expensive and highly engineered. At the bottom left there’s a push-button power switch, and to the right you’ll find a rotary temperature control. This isn’t calibrated at all, so it’s likely to be a while before you find the right setting for your room. There’s a clear ‘click’ as you turn the dial enough to switch the heater on. Putting it all the way to the right will give you the most heat, and the hottest oven – Everhot says its maximum internal temperature is about 200°C.

While many modern heaters use digital controls, those on the Electric Stove are mechanical. Everhot says this is partly for longevity, but it also has the advantage that you can connect the stove to a supply with a low or unstable voltage and it’ll still work perfectly. That’s ideal if you’re at the end of a dodgy rural power line, or using a generator off-grid, but it’s also great if you’ve got solar panels and a power diverter such as the MyEnergi Eddi.

Power diverters can work to dump any spare solar energy into a simple heater by varying the supply voltage. Usually they’re connected to an immersion heater to provide hot water, but if you have one you could also ask an electrician to provide a dedicated output for the Everhot. Doing this with an Eddi, which supports two loads, would let you use spare solar power to help bring a room up to temperature with the stove. While the stove wasn’t actively heating (because it was off or already up to temperature) any spare power could go to your water heater.

A more accessible benefit of this stove’s basic controls is that you can turn it on and off at the plug socket, and it’ll carry on doing whatever it’s set to do. That makes it ideal for using a 13A smart plug such as the TP-Link Tapo P100 Mini Smart Wi-Fi Socket. While the Everheat isn’t strictly a storage heater, this would let you schedule it to use a cheap overnight tariff, and wake up to a warm room – and possibly a still-warm heater.

This stove is designed to get thoroughly hot over time, so it’s ideal for use in a hearth, or anywhere else where it’s away from prying hands. It’s so heavy and stable that there’s no need for tip-over protection. There is a temperature limiter, but this is designed as a failsafe should the main adjustable thermostat stop working. The stove’s very hot surfaces and its opening door mean it’s not suitable around young children, or other vulnerable users.

Performance

• Very long warm-up and cool-down times
• Controls take a while to master
• Steady, moderate heating

Not much seems to happen when you first turn on the Everhot Electric Stove. Within a minute or so, you’ll notice heat coming from its top vent, but it’s not a huge amount, never feeling as intense as the thermals rising up from my two-slot toaster, for example. It’ll be at least 10 minutes before the stove’s steel top panel begins to heat, and longer still before the iron door or steel sides start to warm appreciably. While you wait, you’re treated to a range of soft ticks, clunks, and the occasional zing as metal parts warm and begin expanding.

Unusually, this heater’s thermostat begins to regulate its temperature early, rather than allowing it to heat continuously until it reaches the desired room temperature. It takes time for heat to fully saturate the stove casing, and this heater doesn’t do much to the room temperature until the metal has finished soaking up energy.

The Everhot Electric Stove isn’t suitable for the office where I usually test heaters, so I set it up in our open-plan kitchen/diner, which has a larger floor area of roughly 35 square metres. After 30 minutes, the heater had only raised the air temperature here from an already cosy 21°C, to 21.3°C. Our two room thermostats in the kitchen and lounge registered similar increases. At this point, the top and sides of the oven were only just cool enough to touch, while the iron oven door was still only just beginning to get warm.

While it’s rated at 1.5kW, I measured this heater’s power demand at 1,572 watts – nearer the 1.6kW mark. Despite this, in 30 minutes, the Everhot Electric Stove had consumed just 0.49 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity, underlining how much it was cycling on and off. Operating constantly, I’d expect a 1.6kW element to use 0.8kWh over half an hour.

In fact, it took an hour to reach that level. By that point, all of the oven’s surfaces were much too hot to touch, while the door was finally becoming very warm. The room temperature had still only risen by around 0.6°C in an hour, but the stove had now begun to radiate plenty of heat. This made the room feel extremely cosy for anyone sitting within a couple of metres, but it didn’t do so much for those any further away.

After two hours at its maximum setting, the Everhot had consumed 1.33kWh, and warmed my large room by about one degree Celsius. However, an hour after I turned it off, the room had continued heating by a further 0.4 degrees as the stove released all its stored heat. Even at this stage, its top panel and door were still quite hot to the touch, and I could still feel the heat radiating into the room.

Everhot stresses that this stove is designed for gentle heating, and not as the primary heat source for a room. In practice it’s effective, but not enough to get our kitchen/diner fully cosy on a cold winter day without help from its underfloor heating. The Everhot certainly isn’t brutally powerful like a small log burner, which could easily put out around 4kWh of heat each hour. That’s roughly five times as much as I got from the Electric Stove.

I used the Everhot Electric Stove to bake a potato. It’s hard to set an exact oven temperature with its uncalibrated thermostat, but I nudged it down very slightly from its 200°C maximum in the hope this would be around 180°C. This seemed to work perfectly, delivering a crisply baked potato in a little under 90 minutes.

As an added bonus, I realised that I could use the hot top surface of the oven to prewarm my dish, and keep it warmed while I was grating cheese. You do need to take care not to block the heat vent, though.

It’s a bit of a niche application, but having a heater that also cooks could save you money when it comes to dinner time. If the Everhot is on anyway, you’re not paying extra to heat an oven. For a slow-cooking dish like a casserole, that could save you a couple of kilowatt hours of electricity. You’d save less when cooking a quick dish like pizza, and with some drippy or spitty foods I’d be concerned about making a mess of the beautiful interior.

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