So we're doing our loft as well as forward planning for renovating the rest of the house.
Time has come to choose radiators / heated towel rails for the two new bedrooms and the bathroom.
I'm just after a very brief explanation of rads (or pointer to good articles explaining), in particular relating to a couple of questions I have.
The bathroom is roughly 2.7m (l) x 1.7m (w) x 2m (h). The bathroom supplier we went and saw put down a £300 towel radiator that has a BTU rating of 2500. Using a couple of BTU room calculators I found it seems like we'd only need one closer to 1300 BTU to heat that room. Is there anything wrong with getting a much cheap radiator for like £150 that has a more appropriate BTU rating? Excluding the BTU rating, whats the difference, other than design, between cheap towel rails ( B&Q, Homebase etc) vs expensive catalog/branded rails? I can see cheaper ones might not have long warranties or might scratch easier but seems to me pipes with hot water in them would all be roughly the same?
Also thinking about heating rooms in general, at the moment all the other rads are old solid panel style. Some (eg unused rooms or bedrooms) we turn the valves down on the rad itself. The thermostat in the hallway doesn't seem to be connected, setting it to 40+ degrees has no affect. So we control the overall house temp by altering the heating water supply temp level on the combi boiler itself. We've been setting this to between 46-53 degrees (water temp) depending how cold we are.
So if a rad is rated at say 5000 BTU and a room needs 10000 BTU to heat it therefore we get two rads in there ... but does the heating not totally depend on the heat of the water we're putting into the system?? Is it the BTU is the max potential heat exchange if near boiling water is running through it? Or some other standard temp?
Basically, I can match room BTU's required to rad BTU ratings, but how to ensure the rad runs efficiently to its BTU rating?
Time has come to choose radiators / heated towel rails for the two new bedrooms and the bathroom.
I'm just after a very brief explanation of rads (or pointer to good articles explaining), in particular relating to a couple of questions I have.
The bathroom is roughly 2.7m (l) x 1.7m (w) x 2m (h). The bathroom supplier we went and saw put down a £300 towel radiator that has a BTU rating of 2500. Using a couple of BTU room calculators I found it seems like we'd only need one closer to 1300 BTU to heat that room. Is there anything wrong with getting a much cheap radiator for like £150 that has a more appropriate BTU rating? Excluding the BTU rating, whats the difference, other than design, between cheap towel rails ( B&Q, Homebase etc) vs expensive catalog/branded rails? I can see cheaper ones might not have long warranties or might scratch easier but seems to me pipes with hot water in them would all be roughly the same?
Also thinking about heating rooms in general, at the moment all the other rads are old solid panel style. Some (eg unused rooms or bedrooms) we turn the valves down on the rad itself. The thermostat in the hallway doesn't seem to be connected, setting it to 40+ degrees has no affect. So we control the overall house temp by altering the heating water supply temp level on the combi boiler itself. We've been setting this to between 46-53 degrees (water temp) depending how cold we are.
So if a rad is rated at say 5000 BTU and a room needs 10000 BTU to heat it therefore we get two rads in there ... but does the heating not totally depend on the heat of the water we're putting into the system?? Is it the BTU is the max potential heat exchange if near boiling water is running through it? Or some other standard temp?
Basically, I can match room BTU's required to rad BTU ratings, but how to ensure the rad runs efficiently to its BTU rating?
