Look at your house from the outside with a thermal camera in winter. What do you see? A bright red roof. A bright red cloud of hot air leaving your windows. You are not heating your home. You are heating the sky above your street, and the gas company is charging you for it. Because hot air is stupid. Hot air always escapes. It goes up, it finds the smallest crack under the roof tiles, around the window frame, through the ventilation, and it is gone. You pay to heat air to 23 degrees and 15 minutes later that air is outside at 2 degrees.
Infrared does not play this game. It never heats air in the first place.
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Light That Turns Into Heat Only When It Touches You
An infrared panel is not a heater. It is a light. An invisible light that you cannot see but your skin can feel instantly. Like the sun in March. Air temperature can be 5 degrees outside, but when you stand in the sun you are warm because light turns into heat on your skin.
Inside your room, a 700W ceiling panel sends that same light in all directions. It crosses the air without touching it. It lands on the floor and the floor becomes 23 degrees warm. It lands on your sofa and your sofa becomes warm. It lands on your body and you feel warm in 60 seconds, even if the air is still at 18 degrees.
Because the heat is stored in solid objects, not in air, you can open a window for 10 minutes for fresh air and you don’t lose your heat. Your floor is still warm. Your walls are still warm. Close the window and you are warm again immediately. With radiators you have to wait an hour to reheat all the air.
New houses are too tight. Old houses had drafty windows so humid air left by itself. New houses have perfect PVC windows and 15 cm of insulation. All the water from showering, cooking, breathing stays inside. Humidity goes to 65%. Your radiators heat that humid air to 24 degrees. That hot humid air travels to the coldest point in the room – the corner where two outside walls meet, or the wall behind your wardrobe where air cannot circulate. The wall there is 14 degrees. The hot humid air touches the 14-degree wall, cools down, and leaves all its water on the wall. The wall is wet 24 hours a day.
You paint it with anti-mold paint. The mold eats the paint.
You need to make the wall warmer than the air. Only then will water never appear. A ceiling infrared panel shines directly on that corner and keeps it at 21 degrees. Now the 23-degree air touches a 21-degree wall and nothing happens. No water. Mold starves and dies. In every house we did in the last 5 years, mold was gone in 3 weeks and never came back. Not because we removed humidity, but because we removed the cold wall.
The Heating System That Takes 15 Minutes To Install
Think about what a gas heating system is: gas pipes from the street, a boiler, an expansion tank, a pump, 100 meters of water pipes in your walls, 6 radiators, 6 valves, glycol, yearly service, mandatory chimney check, risk of carbon monoxide, risk of frozen pipes in your weekend house.
Think about what an infrared system is: one panel, 4 screws, one plug.
For a 20 sqm living room you take a 900W white panel, 120×60 cm, 7 kilos, 2 cm thin. You screw the small mount to the ceiling, you hang the panel, you plug it into a normal socket. You stick a small wireless thermostat on the wall where your sofa is. You download the app and you set 21 degrees from 18:00 to 23:00. Done. 15 minutes.
No dust, no breaking walls, no plumber, no permit. If you move house, you take it with you.
It will work for 25 years without a single service because there is nothing to service. No moving parts, no water, no filter, no fire. And if you have 3 kW of solar on your roof, every sunny hour in autumn heats your house for free.
Stop heating air you throw away. Start heating walls, floors and people who stay.
