FOR a people who make up less than a tenth of a percent of the country’s population, the Amish loom large in the American imagination as simple-living, God-fearing country folk who keep the pre-industrial past alive. We know them as farmers and skilled craftspeople, with high standards and an unfussy sensibility that they bring to the barns they raise, the baked goods they sell at greenmarkets and the quilts and furniture they produce.

But the Amish have not traditionally been celebrated for their space heaters. Which likely explains the bewildered reactions provoked by advertisements for a product called the Heat Surge Roll-n-Glow Fireplace, which seem to have been turning up everywhere in the last few months. Under a headline proclaiming the heater’s power to “help home heat bills hit rock bottom”  and depicting it, in one version of the ad, as an “Amish man’s new miracle idea”  a photograph shows what appear to be Amish men and women in a rustic workshop, making fireplace-style electric heaters with artificial flames flickering inside. The ad copy describes “soft-spoken Amish craftsmen” who are “working their fingers to the bone” to create the wood mantels framing the fake fire, as their “entire communities” strain to “keep up with demands.”

And demand does not appear to be slowing, at least according to Josette Holland, described in some of the ads as a “home makeover expert to the rich and famous.” Not only are the heaters “the best way to dress up every room,” Ms. Holland is quoted as saying, they are also “the latest home decorating sensation.”

The ads, which have been around for more than a year but have been running with increasing frequency this winter, have become something of a sensation themselves, turning the Roll-n-Glow into a next-wave Clapper. Appearing in publications as varied as National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, Parade and The New York Times, and on local TV stations across the country in the form of an infomercial, they have given rise to much word-of-mouth speculation and online commentary.