In this paper, the influence of a small heating source, positioned in the lateral walls of a square cavity, is investigated. Numerical and experimental analyses are performed to investigate natural convection heat transfer in a square cavity heated by hot strips in the side walls. The H side square cavity is filled with air and heated by two hot strips with heights of H/4. The effect of placing the hot strips at two different positions is evaluated. The temperature distribution and the Nusselt numbers at different Rayleigh numbers are experimentally measured using both real-time and double-exposure holographic interferometry. The isothermal patterns obtained through the holographic interferometry are compared with the temperature and velocity fields from a numerical study performed using the finite-volume code Fluent.