Unsure of whether you need one or two radiators in a room?
Deciding can be tricky when you don’t know what to look out for. After all, the worst thing you could do is to choose radiators that aren’t up to the job of heating your home, therefore leaving you feeling cold in the depths of winter.
Luckily, there are some ways to help you work out exactly what you need.
As an experienced engineer, I’m going to tell you how to figure out whether you need one, two – or even more – radiators in your room.
How to determine how many you need
I would always wish to overheat a room rather than underheat and have my clients feel cold. And because of this, in many cases I’ve recommended fitted two radiators instead of just one. But to work out what’s needed, we have to do our heat calculations first.
If you want to get a better idea for yourself how many radiators you might need, take a look at this online heat calculator. It’s the best one I know. In a nutshell? Well, it all comes down to the location, size of the room, heat loss and insulation.
For example, if you have a large room with high ceilings, bay windows and the room is longer than 4000mm then it’d be very difficult for one radiator to heat every corner of the room. So, if you have two radiators, even the same output as one can make the room more comfortable.
Most of the time, you’ll find your engineer has come across scenarios similar to yours many, many times. It could be something as simple as your radiator being stuck being a sofa and can’t get the heat out, or having a radiator that just isn’t big enough.
TIP: Not to mention the fact that vertical radiators are notorious for not giving out the same level of heat as standard horizontal radiators. Even if they have fins, they still don’t have the same length to convect at a horizontal radiator. *INSERT LINK*
Advice from an experienced engineer
You can get vertical radiators in numerous sizes – even 300mm wide. So, there may be a small wall you never thought a radiator would fit on! This means there could be many more options for fitting two radiators than you might think!
The best advice I can give you is to look at different brands, as different manufacturers have varying outputs for the same size of radiators. Also, different manufacturers may have different sizes. For example, the smallest most do is 300mm wide, however I’ve come across some that are 280mm wide – that 20mm can make all the difference.
I once had a client who designed their own open plan kitchen living area. However, on her plans, she only had space for two radiators. Doing the calculations, it wasn’t going to be enough to heat the room. Instead, we made the two proposed radiators longer by 100mm and fitted a very narrow 300mm wide vertical radiator on a small nib wall. Issue solved!
Conclusion
