The CH radiator I have in my Bathroom seems inadequate for the size of room . It's always cold ,the bathroom,not the rad ... .Is there anywhere that shows,based on the size of the room ,what specs of radiator you should have to heat it properly ..What is in there at the moment is a single panel,thin thing ,unfortunately situated at the narrowest part of the room ...
Stuart
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Here's bunch of relevant stuff, just copied from my IE favorites. I went throgh similar, replacing a towel rail (no radiator at all!) with a radaiator. I'd recommend a sharp top radiator to stop towels from sliging off, but that's a minor point. Enjoy
I'd recommend a roll-top radiator so that the radiator can do its job of heating the room and not be some convenient towel-drying contraption.
Mungo
The heat loss of a room varies enormously based on the construction. For example, a solid brick wall has 4-5 times the heat loss at least of a well insulated cavity.
Therefore, rule of thumb figures based on room size are totally useless.
You could go through the exercise of determining the heat loss of the room properly by measuring all the sizes and calculating. You would need to know the construction details and resultant heat loss factors (U values) for each surface. There are programs for doing this on various radiator manufacturer web sites such as Barlo.
Another, less scientific way is to do a practical measurement.
With the heating turned on and stable, measure the inside room temperature. Do this relatively late at night when the outside temperature has dropped. Measure the outside temperature as well. The heat loss is proportional to the temperature difference from inside to outside to a first approximation.
Now look at a radiator manufacturer's web site and look up the radiator type that you have (presumably without fins?) as near as you can. Make a note of the output power in watts.
You can now scale up.
Let's say that the outside temperature is 5 degrees and the bathroom is just managing to get to 16 degrees (which would be chilly for a bathroom). This is a temperature difference of 11 degrees.
It is conventional CH design practice to design for -3 degrees outside, so let's say you'd like the bathroom to be at 23 degrees (i.e. a worst case of 26 degrees)
If your current radiator (for example) had an output of 800W, then you would need to scale it up proportionally i.e. 800 x 26/11 = 1900W.
Pick a radiator that will do about or more than that. Probably the easiest would be to upgrade to a double panel with fins of about the same size to make plumbing easier. You need to check though.
If you err on the high side, you can always fit a thermostatic radiator valve to back off the output.
This is not a 100% scientific method, but it would give a pretty good estimation and a lot better than guesstimating from a room size alone.
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