I have a new wetroom downstairs. Dimensions are 1.5x2.9x2.6. Was planning t o have towel radiator of 500 x 1600 but not sure that will be enough in win ter. Have looked at past posts and opinion about the way these towel radiat ors are effective at heating sufficiently. The radiator will be on the end of a single pipe system too! Has anyone any recommendations for a radiator of 500mm width that would hea t the room to make it comfortable for short usages in winter?
My son seems to have bought an electric underfloor heating element for his refurbished bathroom. I have doubts about the whole idea, but he seems very keen. It's a t&g floor and the plan seems to be to lay thin ply, then the mat, then something else then the wetroom-ish flooring.
Was planning to have towel radiator of 500 x 1600 but not sure tha
t will be enough in winter. Have looked at past posts and opinion about
the way these towel radiators are effective at heating sufficiently. The r
adiator will be on the end of a single pipe system too!
that would heat the room to make it comfortable for short usages in winter?
A towel rail is definitely not enough for heating a wetroom. You really do need a radiator as well. And get a towel rail that works from the central heating but also has an electric element.
Ideally you should be able to have the wetroom much warmer than the usual indoor temperatures, especially for disabled who take a long time to dress and dry.
Our bathroom is very cold - two outside walls and poor insulation. We ripped out the old heated towel rail and installed a sizeable double radiator. That works.
We added a towel rail that sticks out over the radiator - a metal kitchen shelf from ikea. I can probably find it if you're interested.
Probably too late now to consider a wall hung fan heater. In my limited experience they are good when shower time is unpredicatble. They also allow users to sit under warm air while drying off. But others may know better; they are not aesthetically pleasing; and they are patently not possible in small rooms.
Doesn't that rather depend on the towel rad and the room?.
Our Bathroom, about 3.3 x 2.8 x 2.4 m, old Victorian house, 1 outside wall solid brick with a bit of internal insulation, poorly insulated roof above.
It has a 600 x 1750 towel rad, this one IIRC:
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Which gives enough heat output for the room. (ok you have to take into account some towels on there sometimes, though in reality for us, we tend to often hang some towels over the shower enclosure (it's a 3 sided one) or put them back in the airing cupboard to be warm).
So far it has kept the room plenty warm (turn the stat up full and it gets to warm) though it only went in this time last year, so we haven't had a cold winter yet.
I have fitted an electric element, but it isn't as yet wired up to the mains, and I made provision for fitting a supplementary fan heater in the room, but again, not felt the need yet. On another tack, Andrew Gabriel has posted before about the supplementary underfloor heating he installed using microbore pipe under the floor boards.
To the OP,
If you do a heat loss calculation for the room then you will know what size radiator you would need to keep the room warm.
+1 on underfloor heating. A warm tiled floor makes all the difference in a bathroom, just dont cut corners on where you run the heating cables - cover the whole floor. The heat doesnt move sideways very well.
As for towel rail radiators - when sourcing them 8 years ago I found the polished SS ones gave significantly more heat output than the chrome plated ones.
I'm currently doing one for a friend in spare moments.
My personal preference is a radiator, which has an unheated towel rack high on the wall above it. This enables it to both heat the room and dry towels. However, radiators often get veto'd by those who have to run it past the wife, so you end up with a towel rail which is insulated by towels, and doesn't heat the room, and that's the situation in the room I'm doing at the moment, so I've adopted an approach I've used before very successfully.
This is to use underfloor heating. In my case, I snake 10mm microbore pipes up and down between each joist under the floor, loosely attached to battens which hold it an inch or two under the floor boards (or 18mm ply in this case). Because these are only loosely thermally coupled to the floor, they run at standard radiator temperature, and the solution is very cheap, without needing any blending valve. The exit from the underfloor pipework is then fed through the towel rail, which enables you to bleed the underfloor pipework at the towel rail, and you can fit a TRV on the towel rail which controls the heating for the room. The microbore should be split into at least two parallel circuits, and possibly more for a larger room. It should be kept as horizontal/ level as possible, so it can't trap air in it.
On a single pipe circuit, you are going to have too little differential pressure to drive microbore. It might work if you used 15mm copper pipe instead, or fit it as a new circuit.
Also, make sure the room is well insulated from outside walls and roof.
I also like to have a downflow fan heater in the shower room, so you can stand under it when you come out of the shower, and I have fitted wall mounted hair driers in some bath/shower rooms I've done.
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although it's usually around £28+VAT in their offers leaflets, and includes isolated shaver sockets).
I've fitted these in some bathrooms. Make sure you get one which can switch down to 1kW, or you will find it is far too hot. Some do this automatically when the inlet reaches 25C. You won't need 3kW at all.
Something else to think about is the level of risk that someone will slip on the wet floor and fall against a hot radiator. A downflow fan heater has the advantage, being high in the room, that there's no hot surface to hurt yourself on. It's also cheap to run because you only usually use it when you're in, or about to be in, the room. It also produces heat quickly, which can be useful if eg someone has an unplanned need to spend time in the room in the middle of the night.
It may also help, in conjunction with an extractor fan, to get the moisture from a shower clear of the room quicker than if wet air is condensing on cold tiles.
The big problem with convective fan heating in a bathroom or, in this case a wet room, is the latent heat of evaporation cooling effect which will amplify the temperature changes between stepping out of the shower and drying off.
A better choice might be the old fashioned wall mounted radiant heater with corded pullswitch. Afaicr, they were usually quite modestly rated at about a kilowatt, maybe 1 1/2 KW (possibly with a view to being powered off of the lighting circuit) which leads on to the possible alternative of a celing light fitting with a built in 500 to 750 W? infrared lamp to provide the extra supplementary heating you require to improve the comfort factor.
If its not built yet then running the UFH up the walls will make the whole room warm but still keep everything at a safe temp. UFH is the best way to heat a wet room.
Each to their own. I've lived with those and found them unsatisfactory: stand in the beam and one side of you is toasted while the other freezes; step outside the beam and all of you freezes while the heater merrily heats the wall - usually an uninsulated outside wall :)
And as Andrew Gabriel has pointed out, you can get fan heaters with thermostats and/or automatic reduction in power - although 'er indoors considers a thermostat on a bathroom heater a purely decorative feature.
Another factor, depending on size, shape and layout of bathroom, is that the IR heaters tend not to be IPx4 rated for understandable reasons
Lots of them ended up being stripped out when PAT testing came in, because the silica glass heating element tubes had to be treated as a live part (presumably because of the ease with which they break), and the heaters didn't have IP2X finger guards. So you could poke a finger through and touch the heating tube, and the element if the tube was broken.
I recall my grandparents had one of the classic ceiling mounted combined light/heaters in their bathroom, and it might have warmed your head and sholders, but the rest of you was freezing cold.
to have towel radiator of 500 x 1600 but not sure that will be enough in w inter. Have looked at past posts and opinion about the way these towel radi ators are effective at heating sufficiently. The radiator will be on the en d of a single pipe system too!
eat the room to make it comfortable for short usages in winter?
Thanks everyone for your comments. I will look at a better 'radiator' - unf ortunately I did not install UFH and will have to live with that decision n ow.
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