Making Heating More Efficient – Using foil behind radiators
Today we are going to reflect on how you can save money on heating your house.
Even if your walls are the best insulated in the world, which they are probably not, some of the heat from a radiator is sent backwards into your walls. This heat loss is not so great with convection radiators, but why would you want to lose any of that heat into your walls? After all you are paying for it, so why waste it?
If a wall is soaking up heat from a radiator it is not going to release much of it back into the room. This problem can be overcome quite easily, by simply fitting radiator foil
to the wall directly behind the radiator. This will bounce the heat back into the room, making your heating more efficient and your room warmer. You can then turn your thermostat down and that will bring down the cost of your heating.
While we understand that you may not like to have highly reflective silver foil all over your walls, you can cut it down smaller than the radiator, so it is not visible. Unless that is you are living in a house that has pretensions of being the 1950’s idea of a space-age home, in which case you may want to make a feature of it, and coat the whole wall!
Even if the foil is cut down so that it can’t be seen from the front, it will still reflect most of the heat from the radiator back into the room, making (with our own calculations) a 10% difference to the room-heating efficiency of each radiator. However the calculation does not really matter too much, the idea is just full of common sense!
Radiator foil is available on a 4 meter roll, and you can just cut it down to size. You only need to use ordinary household scissors to cut it.
Click on the image to go to Screwfix where you can buy the foil online with next day delivery. The radiator foil is stuck to the wall using adhesive and can be pressed in place using a thin batten or a radiator paint roller if you have one.
If you want more great money-saving ideas why not go to our project How to Save Money on Your Heating Bill.
