I have a brief memory as a kid of living in the house my family rented until age 5. The rental home was an older house and it had old style floor-mounted radiators. Commonly referred to as column radiators you still see them in older buildings and when they’re heated, it can be difficult to put your hand on them for more than a few seconds. They get very hot.
While forced air heating and cooling systems with a furnace and blower forces air through ducts throughout your home efficiently, it’s a louder system that tends to dry the air and can aggravate allergies through the movement of air.
A panel radiator heats water in a closed system that produces warm air through convection that gets circulated throughout a room. Each room may have one or more panel radiators of various sizes depending on need with its own thermostat. Radiators also have single and double panels to offer varying levels of heat.
What is the difference between single and double panel radiators?
A single panel radiator has one set of radiating fins inside the heater whereas a double panel radiator has two. So a double panel radiator unit has more heated surface area and can thus heat more than a single panel unit can.
A larger room will be better off with a double panel(s) heater and may need more than one. A small room such as a small bathroom or kitchen may be better suited for a single panel radiator. In addition to the amount of heat produced, you also need to take into consideration the size of the heater for the room it is going in.
A smaller room may only fit a single unit and also only need the heat produced by a smaller one. A larger room needs more heat generated and can also accommodate a larger sized heater too.
What is the benefit of a wall-mounted panel heater over forced air heating?
It’s cleaner: With no ducts to worry about, there is no dust or debris in the air and no filters to clean. While you may have a separate air filtering system that has disposable filters, the panel heating system has no filtering system to be maintained since it isn’t an air-based system, unlike a forced air system.
The air isn’t dry
A furnace draws dry outdoor air into the home and heats it which has a tendency to lower humidity in the home and cause the air inside the house to also be dry. So if you notice dry skin and wake up with a dry throat in the middle of January when the weather is cold, now you know why. It’s also the reason that furnaces often have a humidifier added to moisten the air by adding water.
Quieter operation
Panel heating systems have no noisy furnace kicking in every time the heat turns on. There is no noise whatsoever and no fan or blower or other mechanical parts that make noise. Other than the low sound of air inside one or two radiators in my house as it’s heating up, they make virtually no sound.
Less things to break
Since there is no furnace, blower, fan, ducts or related equipment the system has less costly parts that break. No filters to replace and no ducts to be cleaned either.
Panel heater thermostat and air valve
The main parts of a panel heater that a user needs to be aware of are the thermostat to adjust temperature and the air valve to release air when it is caught in the line.
Panel heater thermostat adjustment
By turning the circular knob from 0 (off) to 5 (hottest setting) you can decide how hot your room should be. One benefit of the panel heating system is that each panel heater has its own individual thermostat to adjust the temperature for that room.
So while the main temperature for the home is set in the main system panel as shown above, you can then fine tune the temperature for every room. That way if each person wants their room set a bit differently, no problem.
There is also a freezing temperature setting set between 0 and 1 which when used would turn the heater on only when the room temperature gets really low to the freezing point. This is a useful setting to use in a basement or room that isn’t being used to maintain a bare minimum temperature and to ensure that the room doesn’t fall below freezing.
How to bleed a panel heater with an air lock
With a closed water system like a panel heater, air can get in the lines that needs to be drained. Otherwise individual panel heaters can stop working or may only heat on one side as the air prevents it from working properly.
If you look at the photo above, you see a closeup of the air valve, the white plastic knob. Look for the flat head screw on the end of the white knob. Then look at the small hole at the top of the white knob. When you open the valve by slowly unscrewing the flat head screw, air escapes through the small hole which is how you bleed it. You keep the valve open until a small stream of water squirts out to let you know the air is out of the system. Tighten up the screw and the heater should begin heating up.
In my experience, several radiators on the top floor (the ones farthest away from the basement where the system control panel is) needed to be bled as the winter started each year. It only take a few minutes to do this.
Cleaning a dusty panel radiator
While a panel radiator system doesn’t move dusty air around like a forced air furnace system does, that’s not to say it doesn’t collect dust, which it does. In the above picture you see a closeup shot of the fins of a panel radiator that is located in a small bathroom. So while the room is small and isolated it still collects dust over the year and has never been cleaned.
The other pictures on this article were taken as is and I didn’t bother to clean any of the radiators or the thermostat valve so you can see what they look like while being used. While I need to clean them (obviously) I haven’t quite gotten around to it yet.
The lid of the radiators are held in place by small plastic pins that need to be carefully removed to take the lid off to clean the metal fins.
Wall mounted towel heater in the bathroom
One of the convenience factors of a panel heating system is the addition of a towel heater which is typically installed in the bathroom. The tall panel heater in the picture above is designed to drape towels on it to dry them after a shower or bath. It uses the same thermostat adjustment located at the bottom of the heating rack as the regular wall heaters do.
With this particular model, the success of the towel rack is limited. Of the four distinct sets of racks, only the bottom two rack segments heat up to any degree. The top two racks remain cool and don’t work whatsoever. When I had the system serviced by a professional HVAC technician, he mentioned that some towel racks are on the cheaper side and like this one, often don’t heat all the way to the top.
Panel heater system water pressure must be kept in check
An important part of the closed system nature of panel heaters is that the system is filled with water and is then tightly capped. In order for the system to work properly the system’s water pressure has to be kept within the correct range so that is not too high but also not low that it impacts its ability to get water all the way up to the top floor of your home.
With boilers in general a range of 1 to 2 bar or 14 to 29 pounds per square inch (psi) is often the desired range for water pressure. With the system shown in this article, the necessary reading is 1.5 bar or about 22 psi.
The system is set up so that you can attach a hose to a fresh water supply and to the system itself to pump in water to raise the pressure or let some water drain out if the pressure is too high. I have to add water once per year around the time the winter starts and the heaters start to kick in.
How can a closed system lose water pressure over time?
The panel heating system is closed off so that once water is injected into the system, it is tightly capped off so that no water can escape. But water does escape from the system over time resulting in you having to top up the water pressure perhaps once per year like I do.
The two main reasons for water loss are:
Evaporation: This is the big reason for water loss in a panel heating system. Heating water results in evaporation and water is thus lost over time as a result just like if you’re boiling water on the stove. This is why your car radiator uses specially designed coolant rather than just water. If you heat and boil water long enough, eventually it will completely evaporate. With a panel heating system, the heating of water results in evaporation over time since the water is being heated but not necessarily boiled so evaporation is slower.
Bleeding the valves: This is a smaller loss of water but you open a valve to let the air out from any individual heater, any water that escapes lowers the water pressure.
Summary
While a panel radiator system is the standard in Europe and other areas, North American homes tend to use duct-based furnace and forced air systems. In Europe where homes are built with concrete, it would be very difficult and costly to install ducts throughout a home. With North American homes being built predominantly with wood structures, a duct system is easier and more functional.
A forced air system also suits various North American climates since many areas get very cold winter and very hot summers. The furnace, air filter and duct system can be used for air conditioning in the summer too so you can make use of it year round without needing to add another air delivery method.