radTherm® v Infra Red Heating
Infrared Heating: Suitable For Main Living Areas/Whole Home Heating?
If you’ve spent any time researching electric heating options, you’ll almost certainly have come across infrared heating panels. They’re marketed heavily online, they look sleek, and the sales pitch is seductive: slimline panels that mount flush to a wall or ceiling, heat “objects and people directly rather than the air,” and promise big savings over traditional heating. It’s an appealing story, and we understand why so many homeowners ask us about it.
But it’s a technology we’ve deliberately chosen not to put our name behind at Cotswold Heating Solutions Ltd. This isn’t because we haven’t looked into it, and it isn’t because we’re wedded to one particular product range out of habit. It’s because when we’ve assessed infrared heating honestly, against the properties and the customers we actually serve, it consistently falls short of the alternatives we do recommend – particularly radTherm® smart core, partial storage electric radiators. Here’s our reasoning, laid out as plainly as we can.
What Infrared Heating Actually Is
Infrared panels work on a genuinely different principle to conventional heaters. Rather than warming the air in a room through convection, an infrared panel emits radiant energy that travels through the air largely unaffected and warms solid objects and surfaces directly – walls, furniture, floors, and people. Those warmed surfaces then radiate heat back into the room and warm the air secondarily.
It’s the same principle by which you feel the warmth of sunlight on your skin on a cold day, even though the air temperature hasn’t changed much. This is a real physical effect, and it’s the basis for a lot of the marketing claims around infrared heating: “it heats you, not the air,” “no heat lost through draughts,” “instant warmth the moment you switch it on.” Some of this is true in a narrow, technical sense. The problem is what happens when you try to apply that principle to heating an entire home, day in and day out, through a British winter.
Where the Marketing Gets Ahead of the Physics
“Infrared is more efficient” is misleading. Almost all infrared panels are simple resistive electric heaters at their core – the same basic principle as a panel heater or an immersion element. Like any resistive electric heater, they convert electricity to heat at close to 100% efficiency. That’s a perfectly respectable figure, but it’s exactly the same figure you’d get from radTherm®’s ceramic-core radiators, from a basic panel heater, or from an electric boiler. Infrared panels aren’t more efficient at converting electricity into heat than any other resistive electric technology – they simply deliver that heat in a different form. Marketing that implies infrared panels somehow “do more with the same electricity” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Radiant heat alone struggles in real rooms. The direct-warmth effect of infrared is genuinely pleasant when you’re sitting close to a panel and in its direct line of sight – much like sitting near an open fire. But as soon as you move out of that line of sight, behind furniture, in a different part of the room, or in a room with a complex layout, the effect drops away quickly. Unlike a radiator or convector heater, which raises the temperature of the air throughout the room and keeps it there, an infrared panel’s benefit is highly directional and highly local. For a small, simply shaped space where the occupant sits in one fixed spot, that might be fine. For a typical living room, kitchen, or bedroom with people moving around, sitting in different chairs, or spending time in different parts of the room, it’s a much less reliable way to deliver consistent comfort.
Background air and fabric temperature still matter. Because infrared panels don’t heat the air directly, a room can feel warm in a patch of direct radiant exposure while the ambient air temperature – and the temperature of the walls, floor, and furniture outside that direct line of sight stays considerably cooler. That matters for comfort, but it also matters for the building itself. Cold air harbours moisture, and cold surfaces are exactly where condensation and, over time, mould are most likely to form. In the older, solid-wall properties that make up so much of the Cotswolds housing stock – properties that are often more prone to damp and condensation issues to begin with – we’re wary of any heating strategy that doesn’t reliably raise the temperature of the whole room, walls included.
Sizing and coverage claims are often optimistic. A great deal of infrared marketing quotes coverage figures – “this panel will heat a room of X square metres” – that are calculated under favourable assumptions: a well-insulated, well-sealed, simply shaped room with the panel positioned optimally. In the real, often irregularly shaped rooms of a period cottage, with solid walls, low insulation levels, and furniture in the way, we’ve seen installations where customers end up needing considerably more panels, and considerably more running cost, than they were led to expect at the point of sale.
The Running Cost Reality
This is where we think the infrared conversation most often goes wrong for customers.
Because infrared panels are simple resistive electric heaters, they cost the same to run, unit for unit, as any other electric resistance heating. There is no inherent running-cost advantage to infrared over other forms of direct electric heating; the physics simply doesn’t support that claim, however it’s dressed up in marketing copy.
Where we think infrared genuinely loses out is in usable heat retention. RadTherm®’s patented ceramic-core radiators have high thermal mass, meaning they absorb, store, and then release heat gradually over time, smoothing out the room’s temperature and reducing the amount of on-off cycling the heating element has to do to maintain comfort. Infrared panels, by contrast, have very low thermal mass. The moment the panel switches off, the radiant effect stops almost immediately, and without a genuinely warm body of air and fabric left behind to coast on, the room can start to feel cold again quite quickly, particularly once you step outside the panel’s direct radiant field. That tends to mean more frequent cycling and less forgiving performance if the system is turned off, even briefly, which in our experience translates to higher real-world running costs than the headline efficiency figures suggest.
No Built-In Thermal Storage, No Tariff Flexibility
This is one of the clearest, most practical reasons we steer customers away from infrared as a whole-house solution. Infrared panels, like electric boilers, generate heat the moment you switch them on and draw electricity at whatever the prevailing rate happens to be. They have no capacity to store energy generated cheaply – say, on an overnight tariff – and release it later when it’s actually needed.
Compare that with the radTherm® approach we do recommend. RadTherm®’s high thermal mass ceramic core allows it to partially store and release heat as and when required to minimise running costs. Typically energy consumption is around 12-15 minutes per hour only. This is something a fleet of infrared panels simply can’t replicate, because they have no meaningful thermal storage capability of their own.
For a household genuinely trying to manage and minimise electricity costs over a full heating season, that’s a significant, structural disadvantage for infrared – not a matter of one brand of panel being better made than another, but a limitation built into the technology itself.
Comfort, Zoning, and Everyday Practicality
We also hear a lot of enthusiasm for infrared’s “instant heat” claim, and it’s true that a panel does begin radiating warmth as soon as it’s switched on. But “instant” radiant warmth in a narrow cone in front of the panel isn’t the same as a genuinely warm, comfortable room and for most households, what they actually want isn’t to stand in front of a panel, but to be able to sit, cook, work, or relax anywhere in the room and feel consistently warm.
RadTherm® radiators, positioned and sized correctly for a room, raise and accurately maintain the air temperature throughout the space, giving the kind of even, all-round comfort that most people expect from central heating – because that’s genuinely what it’s designed to replicate, just without the wet pipework. Each unit is independently controllable, so you still get the room-by-room zoning that makes electric heating so flexible; you’re just not relying on people sitting in exactly the right spot to feel the benefit.
Aesthetics and Installation: A Fair Point, But Not the Whole Picture.
We’ll be fair to infrared here: the panels genuinely can look good. Slimline, often available as mirrors or artwork-style panels, they can be more discreet than a traditional radiator, and we understand why that appeals to homeowners who care about how their rooms look.
But radTherm® radiators have moved a long way from the bulky white panel heaters of years past, and modern units are genuinely attractive, unobtrusive additions to a room in their own right. With over 60 different sizes and styles and with 900 colours available there is plenty of choice. Arguably more importantly, aesthetics are only one part of a heating decision – one we don’t think should be allowed to outweigh the practical realities of running cost, comfort, and suitability for the building, especially in the older, solid-wall properties that make up so much of our customer base.
Where Infrared Can Make Sense
We want to be fair and balanced here, because infrared isn’t a bad technology in every context – it’s simply a poor fit for the whole-house heating role it’s so often marketed for. Infrared can work well for:
- Spot heating in occasional-use spaces – a garden office, a garage workshop, used briefly and infrequently, where the person is reliably sitting in one place and instant, localised warmth genuinely is the priority.
- Supplementary heat in commercial or outdoor settings – pub beer gardens, outdoor seating areas, and similar spaces, where heating the air simply isn’t practical or possible.
- Very small, well-insulated, simply shaped rooms where coverage limitations are less of an issue.
What it isn’t well suited to, in our professional opinion, is being installed as the primary heating source throughout a period cottage, farmhouse, or family home, which is precisely the role it’s most commonly marketed for, and precisely the role our customers are usually trying to fill.
Our Bottom Line
We’re not infrared sceptics for the sake of it, and we’re always happy to have an honest conversation with any customer who’s considered it. But when we weigh up running costs, comfort, tariff flexibility, and suitability for the older, characterful properties we work on most, infrared heating simply doesn’t stand up against the radTherm® and Sunamp combination we do recommend.
RadTherm® gives you even, whole-room comfort with genuine partial thermal storage which solve the problems that infrared, for all its clever marketing, doesn’t – reliable, whole-house comfort at a running cost you can actually plan around.
If you’ve been considering infrared heating for your home and would like a second opinion, get in touch with Cotswold Heating Solutions Ltd. We’ll give you a straightforward, honest assessment of what will actually work for your property, not just the version of the technology you’ve seen advertised online.