Cold Laundry Room - Radiant Heat?

[George]

I'm about to install laminate flooring in our laundry room which was built on to the outside of our house. The room is only about 50 sq ft (5' X 10') and currently has no heating. Which means it gets a bit chilly in there during the winter months (i live on southern vancouver island british columbia). It has a 3 ft high insulated crawl space underneath. I believe the walls have little insulation (old house).

I'm considering electric radiant heat but wondering what wattage would be adequate to heat the entire room. The electric mats i'm looking at range from 300 to 600 Watts of heating in porportion to their coverage area. The 600 Watt unit covers almost the entire floor where the 300W covers just the the 'walking' area of the room and not underneath the washer/dryers.

I'm very interested in anyone's perspective or experience with this.

thanks.

[SQLit]

Your going to pay a fortune for the privilege of gaining a little heat. Radiant heat should be left on all of the time. 600 watts times 24 hours equals 14.4 kw

14.4 times 30 equals 432 kw a month. Times what ever your rate is lets say 10 cents.

43.20 to heat a space that small. Yikes.

[Ed Clarke]

It's an outside laundry, not living space. Tear off the interior wall covering (plaster/wallboard) and put some high grade insulation in there. I like the rigid foam with aluminum foil facing.

Replace the walls with that green waterproof wallboard and paint at your leisure. You should be able to get the walls down and back up in a weekend although final painting will be another weekend. Don't forget the ceiling - you might want to replace that also.

And with the walls down, replace the wiring, insulate the pipes and and ... You may not need to heat it. But in any case, I'd never ever put in electric heat where the walls, ceiling and floor weren't highly insulated.