Infra red panel heater gibberish?

Hi, just talking to a guy getting infra red panel heaters fitted into his house. Whilst googling I found:

A conventional heater heats the around it, which rises to the ceiling, cools, and falls again. This causes convectional currents, which can have negative effects on your health. They can promote cold spots, mould growth, and dust circulation, and make the air stuffy. This can aggravate breathing problems, whereas infrared heating is better for your health, as it does none of the above.

An infrared heater fires infrared beams around the room, which bounce off the objects in the room, leaving them warmed. This is completely safe, as it uses the same technology as TV remote controls! Plus, it?s the same heat provided that the sun provides, without any of the nasty UV radiation.

My bullshit detector has been activated. Should it be?

Take a traditional one-bar glowing electric fire, and make its heating element occupy a 50cm x 75cm area (say), and voila your revolutionary heating panel which you then attach to the ceiling and it radiates down.

So, couched in those terms, yes, its b/s. Personally I'd rather the air was heated by convection by old fashioned "radiators" though YMMV. I always found that what those 1- or 3-bar fires used to do was heat the objects in the room but leave the air pretty chilly.

Proper curtains, insulation, and double-glazing are best, of course.

Watts is Watts

I'd be more worried about a product that can cause third degree burns if you touch it. 115C operating surface temperature is rather nasty.

If you sit in a chair a lot and have one of those IR rich warming bulbs pointed at it then there might perhaps be some benefit.

Yes. Warming the bulk air in the room is the fastest and lowest energy solution to make it feel warm quickly. IR radiant heating is good for open spaces like garages and places where you can't heat the air but still don't want to freeze to death. B&Q sheds and garden centres sometimes have a variant of this sort of directed IR heating.

The most effective electrical devices I have found for space heating are the cool wall fan assisted 2.4kW radiators we fitted in our village hall. The only slight disadvantage is a faint motor noise which may well get worse as the bearings age. The air out isn't all that hot but there is plenty of it.

These replaced old convector heaters that slowly filled the hall from top to bottom with mad hot air. Unfortunately very few of our parishioners can levitate so with the old system the room always felt very cold even though the heaters were running flat out dangerously hot.

Sounds like heaters I've seen in the yards of some suppliers. They don't heat up the air in between them and the people ...

Well its true to an extent.

A blazing coal fire does the same of course, so hardly 'revolutionary'

yes, but the way they are deployed makes a difference. Radiators heat the air around them,. which convects up and heats the ceiling whilst the cold air runs down the windows and walls and collects on the floor.

UFH heats the floor and the air immediately above it leading to warmer feet

Radiant heaters heat that which they shine upon.

Personally I consider that hot air blowers are probably best as they mix up everything, but they are noisy..

replying to misterroy, yorrrick wrote: A good question. The principle is that the heater is supposedly optimised to generate infra-red radiant power instead of relying on heating air and then convection currents to warm the room. If a panel is placed such that it can heat a person directly by radiant energy it ought to get you warmer quicker than a conventional radiator sited, say, behind a sofa where it can only warm you indirectly through warm air convection currents. I've just bought a small one to try out. I'll be mounting it on the ceiling directly above my desk

I do remember when I was a kid I had a wall-mounted infra-red heater in my bedroom which was effectively in the loft, so lots of outside 'walls'. There was no central heating and the room got bloody cold.

If you stood still in front of the heater you could get warm, but as soon as you moved that heat was lost to the cold air. A (higher power) fan heater was much better, though 'too expensive to run' according to my tight-arsed father.

I thought radiators were supposed to be installed *under* windows to prevent that happening?

And wasn't that what 'Servowarm' (were they called) who were the one of the first national company to install CH at a lower price than was typical because they used microbore and placed all the rads nearly back to back on internal walls (so they could use shorter pipe runs and quicker installation times)?

Cheers, T i m

A friend had a 'professional heating Co come in and fit two wall mounted electric fan heaters into his workshop (his work workshop, none of his planning / doing) and they were useless.

I suggested IR heaters, that was fed back via friend to the Co and the fans were replaced with IR. Much better. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

it's as old as mains electricity. Almost no-one uses it because it's expensive and performs poorly.

all electric heaters are 100% efficient

only compared to some madly overpriced system no-one uses

the end result is more or less the same in that respect. Whether you heat the air or the objects first, either way the heat is conducted to the other.

the first bit is not a reason for the 2nd. The 2nd is not true, although not 100% wrong either. IR is used where heating a space with convection is impossible. It results in some warmth at less cost in an open shed, but does not result in even comfortable heat, and it's more expensive for a closed house.

air movement discourages cold spots, mould & to a degree stuffiness. IR is worse on those points

not so

no, it's not. To produce IR the heat source has to run red hot. It's an added hazard.

hardly.

it isn't

Oh yeah.

NT

That may well be part of the reason, but radiators under windows take up much less useful space - you wouldn't put a cupboard there for example.

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, T i m snipped-for-privacy@spaced.me.uk> writes

I think the principle is to warm the occupants and only incidentally the building. Useful for poorly insulated workshop space.

The fact that they confuse area and volume doesn't inspire confidence: "As the surface area of the objects in the room is far less than the volume of air"

Bullshit, like others have said, as indeed are most adverts for heating appliances. You can't beat a traditional fan heater for rapid warm-up IMO, or conventional CH with thermostats for general background heat.

when we moved into this house, it had a new extension and the CH radiators were in the centre of the two walls on which one could place furniture. This was using ½in copper. Since the floor was concrete, I capped one set of terminals as close to the floor as I could and extended to the other set along the skirting board to under the window, which takes up most of the third wall.

Yes, if you do heat the objects they then become heat sources creating convection just the same.Its no different to those bar fires that glow dull red and yes you can feel the heat from them on your skin. Unless they have discovered a 100 percent efficient radiator of Infra Red it will not be any better. Infra red comes off of many objects. I have a light detector, and if I point it at my fan heater, which cannot be seen glowing at all it indicates radiation.

I just hope they are not snake oil your friend is buying. I doubt there will be much difference and besides how do you tell what temperature is if the air is the last thing to heat up? Also if all that cold air dropped and all the warmed furniture and people s surrounding air rose, guess what the net effect will be apart from cold feet..... Brian

Well, I've not found any indication that any form of reheating wins, since as long as some things are warmer than the air, the air will move as it normally does. I guess if you could insulate all windows 100 percent then you could use different heating systems, but normal? No. Brian

Well as always its the insulation that holds the key here too, not the heating. I proposed we used microwaves for heating, you could use waveguides around the house and then take e percentage off to heat a static body of water, perhaps. Brian