How the Latest Technology Can Make Your Radiators More Efficient and Save You Money

Are your radiators efficient? Do you think that you're spending too much on your energy bills during the wintertime? If so, you need to read this article because we are going to look at some of the top technologies that you can incorporate into your central heating system to make sure that it's more efficient. Long-term, it will help to save you money.

Thermostatic Radiator Valves

These ingenious valves are a type of valve that controls the temperature of the radiator automatically. You can just leave them to do their work without having to play around with the settings.

In the past, we had manual valves. That means if you wanted to set the temperature of the radiator, you have to go around to each radiator at a specific time and change it and real-time.

Thermostatic radiator valves allow you to set the temperature in the radiator will open and close its valves itself to maintain that temperature.

Most modern radiators come with thermostatic radiator valves and standard, but if you have old-fashioned traditional radiators, you might not have them yet. Fortunately, you can buy them as after-sales items. So you can have them to radiators that don't already make use of this technology.

Thermostatic radiator valves ensure that you do not waste more energy than you need.

Smart Technology

Smart technology is awesome and it's entering the home all over the place. It is part of the internet of things and it even applies to our radiators.

Smart radiators are fantastic things to add to your home if you want to make your home more efficient. They allow you to do all sorts of things. For example, you can adjust the temperature of your radiators from the bed. Or, if you've left the heating on all day and you're at work and think that it should be switched off, you can do it from your mobile phone! 

You can control your central heating system from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. That gives you incredible control.

Radiator Reflector

Radiator reflector is something that you put behind your radiator. It prevents your radiator from losing heat in the wall behind it. You don't want to hit the wall. You want to heat your room. 

Without a radiator reflector, you can lose a lot of heat in the Wall, especially if it's a North-facing wall. The radiator reflector will prevent that. It won't stop the heat escaping completely, but will minimise the amount that you lose.

These three pieces of technology can make a huge amount of difference to your radiators, especially if you have traditional radiators, as they will make them much more efficient. Newer radiators are built better and are much more efficient, but they will still benefit from this technology.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this article.

Want Your Home to Feel More Luxurious? Read our Top Tips

Some people find it pretentious, but luxury can be a great way to bring a sense of calm to your space and help you love your home. At the same time, many of us are strapped for cash and it isn't always easy to afford luxury. Fortunately, some cheap things that you can do will help make your space feel more luxurious.

Tip 1: Let There Be Light

The right choice of light can do wonders for your home. During the day, you want to enhance the amount of light in the home. This makes the home feel bigger, which naturally makes it feel more luxurious. 

To increase the light during the day, make sure that your paintwork and wallpaper are neutral colours, preferably in shades of white and with an eggshell or satin Sheen.

Increase the amount of mirrors and reflective surfaces in the home to make sure that the light moves around freely. For example, you should think about buying additional mirrors and mirrored radiators, such as those in the MHS radiators range.

At night, it is all about mood lighting. To this end, stand-up lamps in every room can make them feel much more luxurious.

Tip 2: Make Sure the House is Airy and Smells Nice

When I had my building survey done, one thing that the structural surveyor said to me was that I needed to keep the windows open for 10 minutes every day. This is because it helps clean out the home of bad smells and create a clean crisp environment. 

Cleanliness and airiness are both adjectives associated with luxury, so it's well worth incorporating them.

Other things that you can do to help here is to buy air-purifying plants and use wax candle burners.

Tip 3: Cover Up Any Cracks

Many people freak out about cracks in the wall, but they're pretty much a standard in every house. Homes move and this will naturally crack the plaster, but not necessarily the foundations or the walls. 

If you've noticed some cracks, don't worry too much about them unless they are in the walls themselves and not plasterwork. Otherwise, Get an interior decorator in to tape over the cracks and then feather out the paint.

Just filling in cracks can you transform space if you have too many cracks in the home? This happened to ask recently. We had a few large cracks and hired a decorator to come and cover them up and it completely transforms the house. I had a valuation done before and after and the difference was around £15,000in the value of my property. 

Tip 4: Buy a New Radiator

A new radiator will bring light into a room. Go for a high-quality radiator, such as MHS radiators, and you will see just how much they help improve the feel of your home. They're not even that expensive. You can install an excellent radiator for as little as £400 all in. The difference it can make can be very dramatic indeed.

Following the tips above will help you to make the most of your home and make it feel more luxurious. The best thing is that they aren't too expensive to implement.

How to Keep Children and Pets Safe around Radiators

When most people think about radiators, they don't think about them as something particularly dangerous. However, when you think about it in more depth, you can understand the risks and perils.  They contain very hot water and this can lead to burns.

There are several different ways in which radiators can cause injury. For example, the radiators themselves can become very hot during use, and if a pet or child accidentally falls on a hot radiator, they can receive burns.  These burns tend to be relatively minor as the pet or child will quickly move once they feel the heat. 

Another example is when a radiator becomes damaged and starts squirting out very hot water.  This is a much more serious problem and can lead to second-degree, and even third-degree, burns.

In this article, we are going to explore how you can keep your child and pet safe around your radiators.

Make sure the radiators conform to British Safety Standards

I am assuming that you live in Britain. If so, you must ensure that the radiators you by conform to British safety standards.  There is legislation governing the production of radiators and, in part, it addresses the need to ensure all valves and parts are heat resistant and unlikely to fail. 

If you buy cheap radiators online, you might be buying them from unregulated markets, such as China. You should never do this. Whilst you will have to pay more for buying them in the UK, you can still find comparatively cheap radiators here. They just can't compete with unregulated markets. 

And, that's not to say that all Chinese imports are bad. Some of them will conform to safety standards. However, it's much safer for you to buy these via the online UK-based retailers, and not directly from the Chinese markets as the UK retailers will have had the products tested to ensure they conform. 

Have Your Radiators Serviced Annually

An annual service allows you to locate issues early - before they become a problem. A plumber will be able to fix any leaky valves or any problems that might be leading to pressure build-up in your central heating system. 

They’ll be able to find those weak points and correct them. 

Use a Radiator Cover

A secured radiator cover (i.e. one that you secure to the wall, rather than leaving freestanding - I used a free-standing one once and it fell on my nephew, so you must secure it to avoid issues like that. Bless him - he's so cute!) will help to protect your pets and children from touching the radiator directly. 

They should never get hot enough to cause any type of burn. A bonus here is that you can use them to cover the radiator if you opted to buy cheap radiators online (UK radiators, of course!) and you dislike the style. It's a win-win. 

I hope you found this article useful and that you put these steps into practice. 

Why More And More People Are Are Choosing To Install Underfloor Heating?

When it comes to home heating, underfloor systems are fast becoming the option of choice for many householders.  Many of you will be wondering whether it is just a fad, or whether it is here to stay.

In this article, we are going to look at some of the reasons people are choosing to install underfloor heating in their homes. By the time you reach the end of this article, you should understand whether it's a fad or not.

Extra Levels of Comfort

There's no doubt about it when it comes to comfort, underfloor heating systems have something that most other heating systems do not. The only exception, perhaps, is the open fire, which takes us humans back to our roots and mesmerises our minds. 

Fires are cosy, but they tend to be messy and smelly too.  With underfloor heating, there is no mess. The entire system, including the underfloor heating accessories, is all hidden from view under floorboards or carpet.

Underfloor heating offers comfort in a way that no other system can. The feel of walking on a warm floor is something that everyone should experience at least once. And, if you can experience it every day, that will bring a little gem of luxury to your everyday life.

I can guarantee that if you're one of those people who love luxury, you'll find yourself lying on the floor just to get that full comfort feeling from your underfloor heating.  And your pets and children will be lying on the floor for sure!

Great Efficiency

As long as you install your underfloor heating under an acceptable flooring type, and if you buy the wet systems rather than the electric systems, then you will find that your underfloor heating is more efficient than your radiators are.

There are several reasons for this:

1. Underfloor heating offers fantastic heat distribution as it covers a wider footprint when compared to radiators for fireplaces. It effectively covers the entire room.

2. Because hot air rises, underfloor heating as able to eat more of the room than a traditional radiator can. It heats from the very bottom upwards, where a radiator heats from around 10 inches off the ground.

  

In the long term, as long as you have the right type of floor, you should start to see savings on your energy bills within a very short amount of time.  

But remember, this is true of the wet systems but not of the not the electric systems. The electric underfloor heating systems are cheaper to run than electric radiators but more expensive to run than central heating radiators.

It Can Bring a Luxury Feel to the Home

Finally, underfloor heating brings a level of luxury to the home that radiators simply can't. For this reason, installing underfloor heating and can help to increase the value of your property.  Just make sure that the underfloor heating accessories are hidden below the floor because it's all about being as understated as possible while giving as much value as possible.

Is underfloor heating here to stay? Most homeowners and builders would say yes.

How to Kill It with Your Interior Design

Are you fed up with being the person whose home always seems to lack a little style?  If you don't have that sort of flair, it can be difficult to get it right. Fortunately, flair is something that you can learn and I'm going to give you some top tips to help you make the most of your interior design.

Get It Right from the Start

The first thing you need to do is set yourself up for success, rather than failure.  To do this, all you need to do is sit down and determine your style before you start messing around with any of the designs.

By determining and defining your style from the off, you will avoid one of the most common problems with interior design, which is a lack of consistency. 

The human brain naturally prefers things that are consistent and not chaotic. It will, therefore, prefer a consistent style of decor as well.

You must establish the sort of styles you like and the sort of styles and dislike. Don't just go with the flow, or what's popular now. Just because a style is popular, it doesn't mean that you will like it. 

If you're umming and ahhing about that particular style, then it's a good idea to look for a different style.

Understand the Space You’re Working With

Next, you need to understand the space that you are working with to ensure that you select the correct decor and furniture.

For example, if you are working with a small space, you should be looking for small items that will fit in a room. For example, rather than going for a traditional horizontal radiator, you should go for vertical designer radiators instead.

With larger spaces, you need to make sure that it flows clearly through the room. To manage this, you should think about zoning the room. For example, have a zone that acts like a work area, a zone for the TV area, and the zone for the fireplace. Make sure that they blend, but that they are demarcated.

Test, Test, Test

Before settling on a colour scheme, test patches of the wall. Colour that might look ideal in a showroom isn't necessarily going to look good in your living room. It's important that you understand that a colour will change depending on the room.  

For example, grey might work very well in one particular room because it gets plenty of sunlight, but in another room, it might look too dark.

The same thing goes for certain items of furniture, such as your sofas and your radiators. Try to imagine what your room will look like with new vertical designer radiators compared to, say, horizontal designer radiators.

These tips might sound obvious or irrelevant, that they will make all the difference to your interior design. They are worth taking into account when you decorating a room.

How to Choose a Decent Radiator When You’re Overwhelmed with Choice

One thing we can say for certain is that when it comes to choice, there are a many radiator options. As with most things in life, when there is too much choice, it can start to become confusing and we can become stuck wondering if we are making the right decision, flipping from one radiator, to the next, to the next. 

Well, in this article, we are going to try to help you make sense of all of these radiator choices by providing you with some categories that you can choose to limit your search. In other words, when you use the search function on the online retail shops, you can limit your search by these parameters:

Heat Output

Different rooms require different amount of heat, so the first way to limit your search when looking for radiators for sale is to work out exactly how many BTU you need.

To do this, use an online BTU calculator. You can find them on most radiator retail sites and they are free to use. They will return to you a figure, e.g. 3000btu/ph. You then limit your search to radiators that can provide 3000btu/ph.

Size

Next, you might want to look for a particular size of radiator. For example, in a large space, you might want to buy a large radiator, as that will look best in the space.

You might be wondering how this relates to heat output as the size of the radiator makes a difference to the amount of heat it can put out. However, modern radiators have come a long way in recent years and the manufacturers have found different ways to increase surface area without increasing overall size.

This means that you do have some control over the size of the radiator, regardless of heat output. In other words, you can find 3000btu/ph. radiators in a variety of different sizes. Therefore, you can still take size into consideration.

Efficiency Rating

The efficiency of a radiator basically corresponds to the amount of energy it uses to produce a specific amount of heat. For instance, one 3000btu/ph. radiator may use 500 watts per hour (and cost around 8p per hour to run) but another 3000btu/ph. radiator may only use 400 watts per hour. This second radiator is more efficient because it uses less energy to reach the same temperature.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do your own maths. Radiators for sale in the UK have to give details of their efficiency rating to be legal. Just look for radiators that have an efficiency rating of ‘A’ or more.

Colour

Again, the traditional wisdom is that all radiators should be white. However, radiators have come a long way. Once you have all of the parameters above worked out, you can sort the rest of the radiators by colour.

Finally once you have made your choice, but haven't yet made the purchase, do some research to make sure that the radiator manufacturer has a solid reputation.

Things You Need to Be Aware of When Buying a Designer Radiator

In the past, radiators used to be pretty much standardized in terms of their style. Typically, everybody bought the traditional corrugated radiators with which you will be familiar. However, Radiator manufacturing has come a long way in recent years and now it is possible to find designer radiators.

In fact, designer radiators are so popular that there are thousands of different styles that you can choose from.

However, before you rush out and buy your new designer radiators, it is important that you understand how to make the right decision.  Just because a radiator is labelled 'designer', it doesn't mean that it is the best radiator on the market or that it will be efficient.

Instead, before you part with any money, you have to make sure that your new radiators have the following features.

It doesn't matter if you are buying expensive designer radiators or cheap designer radiators, you must buy the radiator only once these conditions have been met.

Efficiency

The first issue with designer radiators is their efficiency. Sometimes, the manufacturers will put style above efficiency. If you buy an inefficient radiator,  they will cost you more to run in the long-term.

When you are buying a designer radiator, make sure that you've looked at the efficiency rating provided by the manufacturer. It needs to be at least A-grade  in order for you to buy it. Otherwise, you will end up spending more money on your energy bills than is appropriate.

Heat Output

The next thing to look out for is the amount of heat the radiator can produce. Unfortunately, designer radiators can come in all shapes and sizes. This means that their heat output might not necessarily be as good as a traditional radiator.

You have to use a BTU calculator to work out how  much heat your room requires and then match the figure given to the radiator you are buying. You can find a free BTU calculator by following the links in this article.

Make sure that your radiator can provide enough heat by matching the BTU figure to the radiator. For example, if the  calculator tells you that you've need 2000 BTU, then the radiator must be able to produce 2000 BTU per hour.

If you are in any doubt as to how to use a BTU calculator (they are very straightforward, so the vast majority of people will have no problem here), then get in touch with your local radiator retailer for advice. They will help you to use the calculator properly.

Style

Only once you have covered the above conditions should you start to consider the style of the radiator. When buying designer radiators, imagine what they will look like in your home. Don't just go by what they look like on the internet or in the showrooms. They might look great with a particular style of decor, but with your decor, might not look as good.

It's very easy to be swept away by product descriptions and images. You need to take a step back to make sure that the radiator is suitable for your space.  Even if you buy cheap designer radiators, you still want to make sure that it fits with your style of decor. Money is money after all and you don't want to waste it.

I hope that you have found this article useful and that you now understand the sort of things that you need to be considering when buying designer radiators.