Trying Out A Far Infrared Heated Poster
Back in March, I wrote a little about the heater in our living room and how I'd probably replace it before the next winter.
Inevitably, though, I got distracted doing other things and so only recently got around to properly thinking about it.
A bit of online browsing led me to far infrared heaters, with an inevitable sojourn into those made with Graphene. For those who aren't familiar, Graphene is a certified wonder material which could one day change the world if the horrendous cost of manufacturing it can somehow be addressed (fusion's just a decade away etc etc).
Far Infrared heaters come in various shapes and sizes, but do tend to be a large panel which may or may not fit in with the "feel" of the room. However, such heaters can usually be painted - with the result that some suppliers sell pre-made infra-red wall art (a picture that heats you, neat).
I decided that an Infrared heater might be quite well suited to our needs. However, I didn't want to start by spending out on a large panel (and also had some unhappy noises directed my way about "big ugly panels"). So I decided to start with a hanging heater not unlike the one linked to above.
This post talks about how we've got on with using it as a secondary source of heat in our living room.
The Living Room
One of the issues that any heater has to overcome is the layout of the room.
The radiators are run by the central heating, which does a good job of getting the rest of the house warm. Unfortunately, because of the knock through into the next room, it's a large (and often draughty) space.
Rather than running the central heating longer for the sake of a single room, we wanted an electric heater to provide localised comfort.
Although that heater isn't far from the sofa (the gap's about a foot at most), it's also right next to an open archway which leads into the next room.
It doesn't take much of a draught for most of a convectors output to be "lost" into the next room. Although we get the benefit eventually, the heater ends up having to heat a much larger space and time-to-warm ends up being unacceptably long.
We used to use a 3kW fan heater which sits in the fireplace opposite the sofa. Although we can no longer use it, it used to do a good job of warming the room up quickly.
Replacing it with another fan heater is quite difficult nowadays, because they all seem to end up carrying reviews like this:
An infrared (or otherwise radiant) heater seemed to have the best chance of heat jumping the gap between heater and sofa without being carried through to the other room.
Installation
The heater is basically a big canvas hung between two wooden bars, so installation is easy: you bash a nail into the wall and then hang the string over it.
It does, of course, need to be positioned near a plug socket. The lead isn't particularly long, but with a rating of 425W you're likely to be fine plugging the heater into an extension lead if needed.
Cost
The heated poster cost just under £60.
That's quite expensive for a printed poster/canvas, but relatively cheap for a wall mountable heater (and cheaper than an Infrared panel).
Heat
Before switching the heater on, I checked its temperature, it was around 20 degrees (as was the rest of the room).
Within about 30 seconds of switching on, the hottest parts had reached 35 degrees
I had things I needed to do, so I left it for a while. When I came back down and checked it later, it was peaking at 69 degrees:
Although there's no user controllable thermostat, the heater has some kind of thermostatic switch built in - at about 75 degrees it switches off (emitting a brief squeak which sounds a bit like a dog toy - not ideal in a house with two dogs, but they soon got used to it).
The thermostat switching in and out means that the heater runs in duty cycles:
Effectiveness as a heater
Note: I'm not talking about efficiency here - electric heaters are 100% efficient because any "waste" energy is emitted as heat anyway.
Although the majority of the heater's energy is emitted as infra-red, inevitably, there is still a little bit of convection, which you can feel if you hold your hand above it.
Being sat on the sofa is not warm in the way that sitting near a heater normally is. It's a very gentle heat and feels more like being caught in the sun during winter.
Actually, it was a little disconcerting at first: only the side facing the heater gets warmed and because it's so gentle it takes a little while to realise what it is that you're feeling (to the extent that my brain was telling me that one side of my body felt a bit weird).
That weirdness didn't last long, though there are things which persist.
The air around you isn't being warmed (or at least, not directly), so moving your arm to pick up a drink leads to it (briefly) getting cold again.
Although sitting near the heater is actually quite pleasant, that's only true whilst it's active. Much like being caught in the sun in winter, you notice it the most once it's gone. With the thermostat kicking in and out every 11 minutes or so, that happens with an uncomfortable regularity.
Heating The Environment
Part of the problem lies in the way that the heater works.
The reason that Far Infrared Heaters are able to have such a low power consumption is that they directly warm objects (and people) rather than needing to warm the air in between.
This is possible because their output is primarily infrared, which isn't absorbed by the air. Instead it travels until it hits something solid (which then starts to warm and emit heat):
The problem is, Infrared travels in a straight line, so most of the heater's output travels straight past the top of the sofa, eventually hitting the wall on the other side of the room.
In a small room, that'd be fine as the wall will eventually start radiating into the room. But, it doesn't work as well when using the art as a secondary heater in a large space.
Positioning
The primary issue with this heater is one of positioning.
To avoid the one-side warm, one side cold feeling (and warm the sofa), the best position for an infra-red heater is likely to be facing down from the ceiling above.
The second best place, room layout allowing, is running along the wall that the sofa faces towards.
In both cases, the panel would also need to be big enough to cover the sofa.
The heated-art, unfortunately, isn't well suited because it can only really be positioned alongside, resulting in most of its energy passing over the top.
Lowering it further wouldn't help much either, it'd just gently warm the end of the sofa (not to mention that it'd look quite odd having a poster a foot above the floor).
Conclusion
Far infrared heating sounds a little bit like magic - it's easy to be dubious that a plain looking, thin panel can warm a room using invisible light, all whilst consuming very little electricity compared to the heaters that we're used to.
It doesn't help, either, that most of the reviews of them seem to be written by manufacturers and suppliers (although, since purchasing, I found a review by someone that I actually trust).
Needless to say, I was a little dubious when I ordered the heater art, but it does seem to do what it claims.
Unfortunately, in our case, positioning is something of an issue and prevents the heater from being used to reliably increase comfort on the sofa.
The squeaky thermostat means that it probably can't go into a bedroom and so it will most likely move to being used in either the utility room or the hallway.
But... I am now sold on the idea of far infrared heating and so will likely buy a small panel to warm under my desk. If and when we next need to take floorboards up, a panel will likely also appear on the ceiling above the sofa.
In the meantime, the hunt for a suitable heater continues (although I do have my eye on a different infra-red heater - one more like you might find in a beer garden).
