Foil heat reflectors for radiators

shown73

Hate to be negative, but I tried this years ago, and it was a complete waste of time. Yes, the wall behind the rad gets warm, but with cavity walls your hardly heating the garden, and it surely has the same effect as heating any other wall. Lots of people seem to be rushing to buy this stuff, but I've never seen a proper quantatative analysis which measures its cost effectiveness. I wonder why.....

derita

Has anyone evaluated the benefits wher home already have cavity was insulation, I assume the reflectors will be less effective although it must be beneficial to stop any heat escaping into the brick work

brig001

Foil behind radiators is always effective. We could argue all day about how effective it is, my guess is somewhere in the region of 5 to 10%. If you have cavity wall insulation, it will still reduce the heat escaping from the house as no insulation is 100% effective. As the saving is small, the trick is to do it as cheaply as you can - using cardboard and tinfoil, or leftover reflective bubble wrap from another job, which is what we did. If you are bothered about it looking nice, make it a couple of inches narrower than the radiator at each side, and a couple of inches down from the top then it can't be seen from the room.
HTH, Brian.

melaniemoo

I fitted the heatkeeper radiator panels in my living room at the weekend and if anything, the room seems colder! It now feels that unless I have my hand actually on the radiator, I can't feel any heat whatsoever coming off it. Has anyone else had this experience?

DVardysShadow

brig001 wrote: »

Foil behind radiators is always effective. We could argue all day about how effective it is, my guess is somewhere in the region of 5 to 10%. If you have cavity wall insulation, it will still reduce the heat escaping from the house as no insulation is 100% effective. As the saving is small, the trick is to do it as cheaply as you can - using cardboard and tinfoil, or leftover reflective bubble wrap from another job, which is what we did. If you are bothered about it looking nice, make it a couple of inches narrower than the radiator at each side, and a couple of inches down from the top then it can't be seen from the room.
HTH, Brian.

Do it even more cheaply. Just use the bubblewrap or the cardboard. They are the effective components, the foil contributes very little.

Sarita

By bubblewrap, do you mean normal plastic bubblewrap? (daft question perhaps) - won't it melt?

Someone else mentioned reflective bubblewrap - what is this?

I've just read good review for a Tesa radiator heat reflective foil, but don't know if just using aluminium foil is equally effective.
By 'effective' I should say my concern is WARMTH as I'm freezing, rather than just saving money!

Surely the foil is an important element as it reflects heat back into the room? that's what I learnt at school, anyway!.
And is the carboard backing important? I was just going to use aluminium foil and double-sided sticky tape. Simples :-)

brig001

We used this: http://www.wickes.co.uk/Thermal-Insulation-Foil-Roll/invt/210022 but we had some left over from another job. I would say the reflective part is important, but I haven't tried with and without to check. You could try just foil and blu tac and try it, then try it with cardboard behind that too to see if you think there is a difference.

To be honest though, if you are freezing, it is unlikely to make a a big enough difference either way. You would be better investing in draught proofing first, then insulation, then some more insulation - one of our upstairs rooms was cooler than the rest of the house, so that now has three layers of loft insulation totalling 450mm and it helped warm it up.
HTH, Brian.