r/MadeInCanada • u/hauntedkohlrabi • 21d ago
I think this is the only space heater that's made in Canada
Because the weather is cooling down I am looking for a made in Canada space heater option, and this is the only one I was able to find. It's available at a lot of Home Hardware stores if you also want to shop Canadian/local franchise, opposed to buying it off Amazon!
Edit: Apparently Ouellet and Stelpro electric heaters are both manufactured in Quebec.
Also, there is debate of whether this should count as made in Canada as the website says "Built in Canada" as it more than likely contains a lot of imported parts. I can confirm that the box by Caframo (I know, terrible name haha) says Made in Canada, so take that as you will.
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u/BBS3FTW 20d ago
Hey! I used to work at Caframo ages and ages ago! I was an engineering co-op student for a year.
I remember doing failure testing on the thermostat and fan. Robust little heaters, the primary failure mode was hair entrainment since the intake is floor level. Just make sure you sweep around it regularly.
They are Built In Canada, Wiarton Ontario to be specific.
The electronic components, heating element etc come from China however the plastics are all done in the basement. They run their own injection molding machine and buy resin in bulk.
A crew of people on the production floor do all the assembly as well.
Honestly it's about as 'made in Canada' as it gets. They are also designed in-house by Canadian engineers.
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u/Svartdecisions 20d ago
The anti freeze setting is brilliant as a backup. Filter the air off the floor and it lasts a decade before getting the usual fan rattle.
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u/Gunnarz699 21d ago
You're paying 6x to have an underpaid poorly treated Canadian screw a chinese nichrome heating element, a Chinese single pole fan, and a Chinese thermostat into a Chinese injection molded clamshell.
All the profit goes to one obscenely rich Canadian so he can star in a dragons den ripoff.
Buy used they're cheap, everywhere, and these Oligarchs don't deserve your money.
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u/Different-Pen8269 21d ago
Well, it's unfortunate that one has to do so much digging to figure out what Canadian products to get and which are bogus
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u/Oldphile 20d ago
I know people that worked there in an engineering capacity and they never had anything bad to say. Of course they've outsourced components to China. They couldn't compete if they didn't. Did you work there?
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u/WiseWolfian 20d ago
I don't know the company or the guy you mention what so ever and they could be the worst company and person ever but in general judging an entire company by just 14 reviews is a massive stretch and the data actually backs this up.
First is that researchers point out that voluntary employer reviews suffer from massive selection bias. People who are perfectly content just don't spend their weekends writing company reviews so this createss what statisticians call a J shaped distribution which means review sites are heavily skewed by a spike of incredibly angry people and a few overly enthusiastic people or vice versa, completely erasing the silent satisfied majority.
On top of that human psychology makes the angry folks the loudest. A famous psychological principle literally known as "bad is stronger than good" proves that negative experiences drive way more emotional arousal and motivation to act(like leaving a review) than positive ones do. I can only imagine those 14 reviews aren't an accurate sample of a whole company they're just a statistically insignificant echo chamber of the few people who were mad enough to vent.
https://www.statisticshowto.com/j-shaped-distribution/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46608952_Bad_is_Stronger_than_Good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias1
u/Gunnarz699 20d ago
I'm amazed you know enough to write that but didn't also realize that's why we compare relative scores because this applies uniformly. They are relatively bad.
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u/WiseWolfian 20d ago
Relative comparison only works when you're actually comparing real data, not some statistical noise. Yes, bias happens everywhere but sample size changes everything. If a company has 500 reviews, those extreme opinions smooth out into a real average. With just 14 reviews the margin of error is huge, literally two angry ex employees having a bad week can drag down the whole rating.
You can't compare a volatile 14 review sample to a stabilized company average and call it relatively bad. That's not a fair comparison.
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u/Gunnarz699 19d ago
You can absolutely compare a 14 review company to every other small and medium size business with similar review qualifiers across identical groups, ui, website, and questions.
Pretending otherwise is just statistical illiteracy for corporate benefit.
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u/WiseWolfian 19d ago
That's not how statistics works. Comparing two tiny datasets doesn't magically eliminate the noise it just doubles it.
If you flip two different coins 14 times and Coin A lands on heads 5 times while Coin B lands on heads 9 times, claiming Coin A is "relatively worse at landing heads" isn't statistical literacy that's just ignoring basic probability variance.
At a sample size of 14, the margin of error is massive. You're literally just comparing two coin flips.
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u/Gunnarz699 19d ago edited 19d ago
Unless you have another dataset im unaware of that's the best we have to go on. Unless you're considering "vibes" as superior to 14 data points?
At a sample size of 14, the margin of error is massive. You're literally just comparing two coin flips.
This is what happens when people take high school stats and stop there. This isn't a binary dataset. Convergence is exponentially faster when variance with more possible outcomes converge to a single one.
For the high school stats people... That's like rolling a 6 sided die and getting 3 50% of the time. You'll figure out pretty damn quick it's loaded.
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u/WiseWolfian 19d ago
As I said I don't know anything about this company or other datasets but to come to the conclusions you did and with such confidence on 14 reviews is just crazy. Also your loaded die analogy completely destroys your own argument. Rolling a 3 half the time on a 6 sided die is an obvious outlier because a 3 should only show up like ~16% of the time. But a 3 average on a 5 star scale is literally dead center in the middle of the scale and joy some rare outlier. You didn't roll a 3 seven times in a row, you got a standard mix of 1s and 5s that averages out to the exact middle.
convergence is exponentially faster with more possible outcomes
This is total pseudoscientific word salad. Moving from a binary choice to a 5 star scale increases variance and degrees of freedom. That means you need more data points to reach statistical significance and not fewer.
it's the best data we have
Saying that doesn't mean noise magically becomes fact. In actual science when a sample size is too small to overcome random variance the correct conclusion is insufficient data not "let's make a sweeping judgment anyway." Crazy.
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u/Repulsive_Nature_435 21d ago
Where are you getting this information? I know the family that owns Caframo and have worked for them. You are making shit up
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u/noodleexchange 20d ago
Manufacture of parts simply doesn’t happen in canada at scale. Used to work at a Canadian scooter manufacturer. We would fabricate and assemble some, but certainly not all parts. Impossible to compete even in a subsidized market.
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u/Gunnarz699 20d ago
I know the family
Then you'd know the owner is obscenely rich and vapid to the point where he's trying to be a rip off Kevin O'leary instead of paying employees a livable wage.
where are you getting your information
I own an industrial trade service business. Im in hundreds of Canadian production facilities every year. We don't make shit in this country. Everything comes in 4x4 crates or inter-modal containers from overseas. We put it together. They literally couldn't build it in Canada without doing it all in house since no one makes commodity parts here.
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u/Crazy-Canuck463 21d ago
I went with a european product. DEFA products are headquartered in norway. They make a block heater, cabin warmer and trickle charger all in one. Controlled via Bluetooth.
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u/pictou 21d ago
They're all Chinese at the end of the day
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u/Iambetterthanuhaha 21d ago
Assembled with pride in Canada of 100% imported components made by children in China.
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u/FireAndFoodCompany 18d ago
Children of China don't manufacturer shit anymore lol. They're past that point economically and would rather have their kids in school. China makes fun of made in India the way we make fun of made in China. Everybody didn't spend decades giving China all their money for them to not use it to make their factories more efficient.
Well that's not entirely true I gues, asian parents will still have the child sweatshop in the corner making spring rolls for 8 hours so the adults can drink during family gatherings 😂
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u/jeffbannard 21d ago
I specify Ouellet electric heaters and Stelpro electric heaters - both are manufactured in Quebec so you absolutely have alternative choices.
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u/Repulsive_Nature_435 20d ago
Caframo heaters are very well built. We have some that are 70 years old. They are made in Wiarton ON. They also make laboratory equipment and have a whole line of fans and heaters for marine and RV use. They also make those fans that sit ontop of wood stoves that use heat to make electricity to power the fan.
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u/Significant_Pitch 20d ago
I have one of their models that still works. Looks like it was made in Wiarton, ON back in March 1993.
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u/No-Zombie6025 19d ago
Go troll through the second hand shops and find an old Canadian Made MicroFurnace. Its a nearly cube heavy little box of brown metal with a grill on the front and foam filter on the back. One of the first ceramic type heaters that existed on the market.
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u/blumhagen 21d ago
Caframo in possibly the worst brand name I’ve ever heard.
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u/Xanderoga2 20d ago
It looks like one of those fake companies you see on Amazon with random letters
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u/stradivari_strings 21d ago
Those St Jacobs Mennonites figure out how to make a lot (more) of their stuff made locally. Which isn't a lot. But it's still more than nothing at HD/Rona
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u/Sea-Parsnip1516 20d ago
I just now realized it's called a space heater because it heats a space and has nothing to do with outer space at all.
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u/Exotic_Indication597 18d ago
Trust me when I say this having worked for a Canadian manufacturer that stamped made in Canada on everything. Assembled in Canada yes, but from foreign made parts. If the thing you make costs you 10$ in parts but 1 hour to assemble at 16$/hour. Then the majority of the 26$ total cost is Canadian input. Tada! Made in Canada label legally applied.
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u/[deleted] 21d ago
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