We are in the middle of winter and with a cold that invites us to have the heating on full (depending on our pockets). More hours and more energy will inevitably translate into more heating costs, but if you also carry out certain popular practices with your radiators, but still. If you want to optimize your heating consumption, these are the five things you should stop doing with your radiators.
stop covering them
The first on the front: the cover image itself. How common it is to take advantage of the surface of the radiators Either for heating/drying clothes (thus increasing the humidity of the air in the room, another mistake), or for aesthetic reasons. Likewise, there are small apartments that lead to placing large objects next to the radiator.
In any case, the fundamental idea is to stop the emission of heat into the environment. If you want to maximize its heating capacity, the ideal is to leave them as free as possible.
Don’t turn them all on
It is relatively common to have radiators placed in every room, but in practice you probably won’t be using all your rooms at all times.
If there is a room that you do not normally use, your thing is to have its relevant radiator turned off. If you follow our advice, after turning off the radiator close the door of the room to isolate itsince otherwise the lower temperature of that space would be offset by the hot air from the rest of the house, wasting the heat from the other radiators.
… but don’t do it continuously
The previous point can make us think about turning radiators on and off continuously. For example, turning off the radiator in your office when you take a break from the kitchen. Mistake. The idea of turning off radiators makes sense when you are not going to use that room anymore while the heating is on.
Think that when you turn off a radiator, the temperature of that room drops and if you are going to use the room again quickly and you need it to heat it again, the thermal jump will be higherwhich means that the radiator will have to work at full throttle.
In this case, what we are interested in is keep the temperature as stable as possibleso that no more resources are consumed.
Each radiator with its temperature
The room where you work throughout the day is not the same as the living room where you spend the afternoon – night in front of the TV than the kitchen where you cook and eat or the bathroom, which you use occasionally. The time you spend in each room and the activity you carry out in it determines what strategy to adopt in each radiator.
In this sense, Radiators in places such as bathrooms, kitchens, and hallways are candidates for adjusting them downwardwhich means that you will spend less on heating.
Don’t Neglect Maintenance: Purge Them
It is no secret and nothing new that heating systems require minimal maintenance to function properly. Focusing on the radiators, the operation is as simple and fast as a bleed that you should do with the arrival of the cold season every year.
The objective of bleeding a radiator is to eliminate the air inside it, since otherwise they will need more energy to heat or even worse, than don’t work well and never get too hot.
Cover photo of eduard on Unsplash