Electric Heating Systems

Energy-saving requires us to change our behaviours in a lot of ways. Some of them are obvious like turning out the lights when you leave a room, don't leave devices on standby, switch them off etc.

But energy-efficient heating like Infrared also requires changes in behaviour which I have to confess I found a bit counter-intuitive when I first learned them but with practice (and a little "pat on the back" when you get your first low electric bill!), seem to make sense.

You see, probaby like most people, I heated the house via a combination of a timer and by temperature. So I would set things up to warm up the house a few hours before getting up in the morning and then switch it all back down again during the day while I was out, and then I would have it warm everything back up again for when I came back in in the evening and then regulate it just by temperature during the evening (so if it got too hot I'd drop the thermostat or if it was too cold, I'd bump the thermostat up). In this way I felt I was saving energy (which is why I found the changes brought by IR a bit counter-intuitive).

What I didn't realise is that heating up a building - which actually really meant only heating up the air inside it to get temporary comfort - is very inefficient in itself as a lot of energy is required to make-up for big temperature dips in a short period of time and equally all that good energy is lost when the heating turns off.

Because Infrared heating works by heating up objects, not the air, you can (and should) adopt a different approach which goes against the above behaviour but it actually saves energy. IR heating is meant to be left on all the time, at a sufficient power to maintain the fabric of a house at a comfortable 21°C. Whilst it takes perhaps 24 hours to raise the overall warmth of the house to this temperature, two things become evident:

a) it takes very little energy just to maintain that threshold and the fabric of the house: the walls and other objects then take-over the radiating job for you. The heater itself can effectively just “tick over” after that. It is more economical to "leave" the radiator in this state, however "odd" that feels.

b) In a house using convection heating, a comfort temperature of 21°C requires the air temperature itself to be raised to 21°C. But with Infrared, the tolerable air temperature of the room does not have to be anywhere near 21°C to allow one to feel comfortable. Indeed, studies have shown that an "air" comfort temperature of just 15°C is entirely tolerable if the walls are at 22°C and that that tolerable air temperature can DROP, the warmer the walls become. Incidentally, lowering the air temperature by 1°C equates to a heat energy saving of about 5%.

The other funny thing was, that only with the energy-efficient heating installed, do you realise how draughty your house is. It was only at that point that I went around the house hunting for the air leaks and causes of draughts that I SHOULD have done years before when using my old oil heating. All I was doing previously was heating up the air for it to be sucked away through cracks, gaps etc.