Selling electric heaters in Canada is like selling sandwiches at subway stations; It’s one of the easiest sales you’ll ever make. But the price you’ll pay to deal with customers after the sale? Definitely not gonna be worth it.

People mess up all the time with these heaters. They forget basic instructions and then make their negligence your problem.  

Let’s go over what you can do about customer complaints, and how to choose the best electric heater warranty for your store.

So popular, but terrifying

The Canadian electric heater market is worth over 3 billion dollars. The market is still growing, and most folks aren’t going to stop using them anytime soon. These heaters are cheap, portable, and easy to use.  

Unfortunately, they can be safety hazards in the wrong hands.  

The government came close to banning them for good back in 2024 because most customers were not able to use them correctly.  

In normal circumstances, misuse wouldn’t be such a big deal if the default behaviour didn’t rely on customers to have flawless memory. Someone could doze off after a day of shoveling snow, and suddenly their home could be up in flames.

“Last week, while my brother was at work, a space heater caught fire. After some time, one of the other tenants smelled smoke and called 911. No one was injured, but the entire house is damaged beyond repair. Landlord is claiming ~1.2 million in damages.”
- An irate user shared on Reddit

What do the regulations say?

In 2024, Health Canada reviewed electric heaters under the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act. They concluded that all heaters need to be compliant with a very specific set of standards in order to be sold commercially.

What this means:

• You can sell heaters, just don’t sell the bad ones

• If you’re hearing too many complaints about a particular heater, reconsider stocking them.
  

Ignoring the last pointer will get you caught in the crossfire between hurt customers and mass product recalls.

Smart heaters, dumb expectations

While standard certification and compliance keep the worst junk out of stores, they still cannot  prevent:

• Power surges

• Sensor failures

• Software glitches in smart models

• Humans doing human things- like plugging everything into one extension cord.
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“A space heater is a high load, long duration device. A house is a dwelling where the electrician daisy-chained and stabbed #14 wires to as many outlets as he could to save on wire during construction. These connections become loose over time and when you're trying to pull 12+ amps through them for 5 hours a day, it creates heat and causes arcing which can start a fire. I've seen so many that I often wonder how this place didn't burn down.”
- An exasperated technician on Reddit.

Customers don’t recognize how their usage patterns impact the product. They’ll do the craziest things despite the infographics, news articles and pamphlets warning them of the consequences.

They’d like to run the heater for more than 12 hours a day during a polar vortex and then act personally betrayed when it fails.  

The reassurance only you can give

You as the seller can’t make heaters any safer; the brands and regulators already handle that. It’s not on you to “make amends”. You’ve got to accept that your customers will make A LOT of mistakes.

One way of applying this acceptance practically is by acknowledging that they’ll make mistakes and giving them ways to solve them.

When customers know that there’s a solution waiting for them beyond the fire, it makes things smoother for you. The case for warranties practically writes itself.

With trusted warranty providers like SureBright, you can offload all the angry calls and emails to them without any worries. For genuine cases, they are bound by law to replace, repair or just pay customers back. For other cases, they’ve got the right processes to deal with difficult situations.

And with simple claims processes, failures become less painful for both you and your customer. That’s the magic of a good protection plan; it feels more like a necessary precaution rather than a shady upsell.

Choose your fighter

You’d be surprised to learn that standard manufacturing warranties don’t really do much. They just cover any defects the product already had before the customer opened the box.

Extended warranties provide longer coverage for these defects as well as for normal wear and tear. These plans are helpful if the customer knows what they’re doing.

Accidental damage protection, on the other hand, assumes a baseline practical reality of messy households, and not some theoritical ideal living. This plan accounts for heaters getting moved around carelessly, bumped, tipped, and yanked.

Only one of these plans matches how electric space heaters are used by people.

No hot takes, just the truth

A lot of electric heaters fail and will continue to fall, and people will buy them again and make the same mistakes.

The only difference between a support fiasco and a loyal repeat customer is based on the system you have in place for dealing with the issues.  

Do you give them just a refund? Or do you give them a good warranty claims process that keeps them out of your hair? When you pick the latter, you make the harsh Canadian winters easier on yourself and for your customers.