Otherwise, in midsummer, fans, air conditioners, and perhaps even radiant heaters for the terrace are in demand. This year it’s different. For fear of gas bottlenecks in winter, fan heaters, convector heaters and oil-filled radiators are becoming bestsellers in hardware stores and electronics stores. If you are unlucky, you may find yourself standing in front of empty shelves. “We are currently seeing above-average demand for electric heaters,” says Germany’s largest electronics retailer, Media Markt and Saturn. “Our sales figures are 100 percent higher than the previous year,” reports Florian Preuss from the Hornbach DIY chain. In the last three weeks in particular, demand has increased again. On the price comparison platform Idealo, requests for electric heaters were more than four times higher in June than in the same month of the previous year. For fireplaces and stoves, the increase was 280 percent. In view of the current gas crisis, more and more people are looking for alternative heat sources, reports Idealo.
Apparently, more and more people are afraid that Russia will cut off the gas in Europe because of the war and that this could have a concrete impact on their own four walls. Partly out of fear of sitting in a cold apartment, partly out of fear of slightly cooler temperatures. After all, in politics to save gas, lowering the heating temperature in the apartments is repeatedly brought up for discussion.
The real estate group Vonovia has announced that it intends to reduce night-time temperatures in its tenants’ apartments. Fan heaters, convectors and radiators seem to be a cheap solution, at least to buy. This is now causing empty shelves here and there. There have certainly been cases where the shelf was stocked with a new delivery of fan heaters on Monday and only a day later everything was gone, according to the hardware store industry. That is not to say, however, that the market has been swept empty. The supply situation is currently not tense, according to the DIY store association BHB.