I was talking to someone the other day and they asked me to quote them to heat up a 33 cubic metre room. After all, it is the air that needs heating up in a room isn’t it?

Convector heating systems (including radiators in a room) heat the air in the room, the warm air rises and the cooler air falls to be heated up and rises again creating a flow of warm air around the room. It is this feeling of being surrounded by warm air that will make us all feel warm in that environment.

So, using traditional convector heaters to work up what power/energy that you need to warm the room you need the volume or cubic metres of space that need to be heated!

Infrared heating though works very differently, it actually heats up the objects in the room. The panels are at their most efficient when fixed upon the ceiling and the infrared rays (an invisible part of the light spectrum) will cover the floor area and provide warmth! The floor, the walls and the objects in the room will absorb this heat and gently radiate it back into the room, thereby heating everything around it, including the air, creating that cosy all round feeling of warmth!

Therefore, when we calculate how much power/energy is required to heat a room, we only need the square metre dimensions as it is the amount of floor area that the panels can reach that is the consideration, not the cubic area!

As a very general rule and as a guide we estimate that a fairly well insulated room with double glazed windows and an internal door will require about 50 watts per square metre of floor space to to provide the right amount of heat. Therefore assuming a rectangular room with dimensions of 4 metres by 3 metres has 12 square metres of floor space then 600w of power/energy are required to heat this room.

If insulation is poor then the amount of watts required will increase. A similar sized room with a large single glazed window in may well need 80 watts per square metre, and if very well insulated then maybe only 40w per square metres will be required.

Of course, just give us the information and we will be happy to work this all out for you!