You might be wishing your heaters were pumping out a little more heat this winter. If only wishing made it so.
Luckily, Apartment Therapy has a tip that’s almost as easy as wishing, and requires no trips to the hardware store.
Put a sheet of aluminium foil between your heater and the wall, taping the corners in place, to reflect more heat back into the room. You can even wrap aluminium foil around a piece of cardboard and slip that behind the heater for easier positioning.
While you’re at it, close your curtains. The great outdoors may be beautiful, but its drafts busting through your windows surely are not.
Make Your Radiators More Effective With This Household Staple | Apartment Therapy
Comments
5 responses to “Boost Your Heaters With Aluminium Foil”
This is an inappropriate article for Australian readers and potentially dangerous advice.
Although Hydronic heating is available in Australia it is not very common, expensive and the ‘radiators’ are usually installed in the flooring rather than the wall radiators pictured.
The wall behind radiators is, or should be insulated so the effectiveness of metal foil is doubtful. Especially in Australia hydronic heating will generally only be found in expensive homes.
If people read the article without realising the advice is only meant for hydronic heating and install foil behind an electric heater it is an ACCIDENT waiting to happen. It may seem a stupid thing to put foil behind a fan heater, but the article uses the generic term heater not a radiator. It should be made more obvious, some people believe what they read.
Plus metals a thermal conductor so I do see how it would reflect heat.
Metal reflects the radiant heat, ie the infra-red radiation. A bar radiator already has a chrome mirror back th o reflect the heat from the back of the bar to the front. Most other heaters are primarily convective including the heater pictured.
This article should come with a big bold warning at the start and the end of the article to not attempt this on electric heaters.
Or maybe found something more relevant to repost?
Not to be too critical because it’s on the right track except the author should have suggested putting foil on all the walls to retain the heat from all the heat sources in the room. Then again, the best place for insulation is probably inside the walls. The next article might be about keeping your head warm with an aluminium foil hat, a modern twist on the old tinfoil hat which is worn to keep radiation out.