Gosh Kevin and other on this bandwagon, why are you so negative? Nothing is all bad and everything requires some maintenance. If the element supports were adjusted there would not be noise from the heaters. Even hot water baseboard heating needs that kind of adjusting sometimes. People without a dog would not encounter the problem you mentioned, but why would you let your dog singe its coat? Keeping the units vacuumed eliminates the burning dirt smell. Usually the covers to these units are removable to facilitate cleaning. What's with your furniuture placement? My apartments with baseboard heating only had units under the windows. Ceiling fans or small fans keep the temperature even, floor to ceiling and I even have to use the ceiling fan with hot water baseboard heating. Since the ad does not mention any one type of electric heating, you focused on your bad experience with baseboard heating. My Aunt and Uncle in Seizure World have radiant ceiling panels and it is very comfortable heat, warming even the floor with infrared rays. Many people are happy with other types of electric heat both here and in the South where I grew up.
You also should put the ad in perspective time-wise. Looking back and totally knocking something based on the way things are now distorts history. Total electric homes used to get a rate break before the 73 oil embargo and there are places in the Pacific Northwest on Bonneville power where electricity is still cheap; of course the salmon are facing extinction becaue of the hydroelectric dams. Baseboard heating as well as the radiant ceiling panels and other forms of strictly resistance heating fell from favor as air conditioning became a standard in new construction. In our Mid Atlantic area, it is still cheaper to heat a home using a heat pump during mild weather with back up heat from an efficient gas furnace that using only a gas furnace since along with electricity, natural gas rates have increased sharply in the past few years.
I remember Boys' Life from the 1960s when Scouts received it free. Each issue had a page at the back where a story was told in graphic or comic book style. One particular story was about a Scout camp of the future, full of wonders. Even though it was winter, the Scouts could wear shorts and other summer atire because of the radiant overhead heating of the entire outdoor area of the camp made possible by almost free electricity from nuclear power. There was great optimism in post war America that technology would make life better, easier and safer. The same dreams permeated the optimism in the 1939 World's Fair when the General Motors Futurama showed the City of Tomorrow where among other things, autogyros would a means of personal travel. Only 3 of the Green Towns shown in the film were built, including Greenbelt, MD where I lived for a decade when all of those dreams of progress had to be shelved while technology was used to wage WWII. Exploration of outer space never brought us to 2001 as predicted in the movie, but space research for rocket nosecones did bring us Pyroceram for Corning Ware. The dreams and predictions based on limitless supplies of cheap energy hit reality head on with the first oil embargo in 1973. Thanks to corporate greed and government corruption, we still have not faced up to the fact that we need to find non-carbon based sources of energy. Energy costs are very high now and electrically heated homes built in cold climates when there were lower rates for electric space heating are no longer practical in many cases, but again, when total electric homes were designed, they were heavily insulated and that along with many other factors made them economical given the rates electric utilities were offering.
In 1982, Greenbelt Homes, Inc., the cooperative that ran the housing in Greenbelt, undertook a huge rehab of the housing. All of the old oil-fired boilers were decommissioned, radiators removed, attics insulated and the 1930s metal casement windows replaced with insulated doublepane vinyl windows. Each home received an electrical heavy up, electric baseboard heat and an electric water heater. The co-op fee we paid each month had included heating and hot water which meant charges for oil and boiler maintenance. These charges were dropped after the rehab and that winter, nobody's electric bill was anywhere near what each home's charges for heat had been in the co-op payment and that was adding the costs of electric heat and hot water to our normal electric use. Those of us who put in heat pumps saw our heating costs reduced even more.
I'm sorry for your bad experiences with electric heat, but they are not universal.
