It can be hard to keep your spirits up in winter. It’s freezing outside, while inside, things aren’t much better, with the cost of trying to heat your home creeping higher every year.

But rather than having to huddle up under mountains of blankets, or hunker down with a hot water bottle, what if there was an easier way to keep warm for less at home?

Enter the SpeedComfort radiator fan. Invented in The Netherlands in 2015, this remarkably simple product is designed to distribute heat faster, and more evenly, from a radiator and around a room. Once installed, SpeedComfort’s heating experts reckon you can turn your boiler temperature down while enjoying as much as 22% off your heating bills.

But how would it hold up against a biting British cold snap? And could this little fan really make a meaningful difference to my heating bill? There was only one way to find out.

When the box arrived, I was a little surprised at how light it was. As a firm that aims to reduce environmental harm, SpeedComfort have done away with the type of useless packing material we have come to expect from electrical appliances. There’s no bubble wrap or polystyrene foam to unwrap, just a simple cardboard box. Forget pages of useless user manuals, too – there’s a QR code that takes you straight to the installation page you need.

There are only three components in the box: the fan panel, a power source and a temperature monitor (which triggers the fans to switch on when the heating is on). It took less than two minutes to assemble the pieces together and attach it to my radiator. It required no tools, or, to be frank, any sort of DIY skills in order to get the SpeedComfort installed.

I was concerned things might be complex, as my home has narrow radiators, but the SpeedComfort can be adjusted for almost any type of radiator or convector. It was simple to click it on to the underside of my radiator – where it was barely visible – while the fan noise was hardly perceptible despite its considerable power.

(Image: Studio 206)

The only way I knew it was working, in fact, was a slight breeze that I could see blowing the clothes I had drying in front of the radiator (which, incidentally, dried quicker than usual). Despite only having one radiator fan attached, my partner and I both noticed that our living room seemed to warm up much quicker than usual. And after only an hour or two with the heating being on, we found ourselves actually getting too hot and had to switch it off again. As a perennially cold person, I can’t stress enough how uncommon it is for me to be petitioning for the heating to be turned down – but that is the power of the SpeedComfort.

Yet what was the actual effect on our heating bills? Well, after a few weeks of using the SpeedComfort across two rooms in our home, I estimated somewhere between a 15%-20% reduction in our normal heating costs for the time of year. And with each fan costing £59.95, and a ten-year warranty included as standard, it represents both great value for money and a smart investment to save money moving forwards. There’s a helpful tool on their website to guide you on how many fans you would require, but I found that a couple went a long way.

And, with the worst of our cold weather still to come, I feel safe (and smug) in the knowledge that my SpeedComfort fans will help to make things a little bit easier this winter.

www.speedcomfort.com