My goal is to keep central heating turned off as much as possible. I bundle up indoors, which works for the most part but I will struggle when temps drop low enough. And hands in cold air on a keyboard are still a problem regardless.

What about using an infrared heat lamp, which traditionally has these use cases:

• keeping pet reptiles warm
• farms: livestock and incubators
• physical therapy for humans (the claims: pain relief, skin healing/repair, blood circulation, anti-aging skin, …)
• (atypical) specifically to warm hands on keyboards (but the emitted light is white when red would be better so as to not disturb natural night vision)

The last bullet inspires some enthusiasm. But I am interested in a DiY project on-the-cheap, buying locally not online.

This array of IR LEDs will be hard to buy locally. But the question is, are LEDs even the way to go? That article has a complaint about the LEDs (ironically) having a short life. And a complaint that they do not produce heat anyway. Is that a failure of just that brand and model, or generally a gimick?

The temptation is to go cheap on the bulbs, but this ad for a heat lamp for lambs is convincing to the contrary. They sell bulbs for $21 that last ~4320 hours. These bulbs are claimed to last 6000 hours.

What about carbon heating lamps? They look like the basis of space heaters, which are notoriously ineffecient. Though I wonder if the problem is just that people use space heaters to heat a whole room… when perhaps it’s more sensible to have a quite low setting to just keep hands or feet warm.

If a typical red filiment bulb is used, is it fair to say a simple dimmer would be useful, such as that of this fixture?