Built in Space Heaters as Only Heat Source in one Unit

[Justin Schaefer]

Hi, so I'm going to look at a small multifamily today and one of the units has space heaters that are built in to the walls as it's heat source. I don't see any other source at least not on the listing anyway. I've never seen nor heard of this before. Has anyone else ever seen this? Should it raise any red flags? I would be house hacking this one and living in that unit myself for a year and was thinking maybe I could replace those with electric baseboard heaters and install them myself and have an electrician just come wire them. Any thoughts? Thank you!

[Jill F.]

You can have built-in heaters that are built-in by design and hard-wired: baseboard heaters and wall heaters in bathrooms, are examples. When you say space heaters, do you mean they have built-in heaters that were not designed to be built-in? The former probably (or may) meet the local building codes, the latter would not.