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Radiators aren’t the most aesthetically pleasing items in the world and they can sometimes be a limiting factor when it comes to redecorating a room – bathrooms especially. A radiator is often quite a large piece of equipment, covering an area of wall which could often be better utilised, but many of us find ourselves leaving them in place when redecorating our bathrooms because we’re unaware of the alternatives.

Installing an underfloor heating system in your bathroom in place of the traditional radiator offers many advantages, not least of which is the saving of space. There are no visible parts in your bathroom when underfloor heating is installed, enabling you to have total freedom when redesigning the room; radiators are a fixed unit which must be accounted for and worked around when redecorating which can severely limit the redesign, whereas heating the room without these means the room can be decorated however you or your designer wishes.

Underfloor heating also offers the advantage of heating the room more uniformly than a radiator or similar fixed unit. Hot air rises and having the heat rising from the very bottom of the room will give the user a feeling of being surrounded by warmth, as opposed to having the heat emanating from a fixed position on the wall, which often leads to the ceiling being hot and the floor being freezing with other cold spots throughout the room.

Though it is possible to heat the entire floor, it is not often advised to do so unless there is nothing static on the floor like a bath or wardrobe. Heating from underneath these is at best a waste of heating and at worst detrimental to the items placed above it. Heating the underside of a wardrobe for example, can cause clothes to sweat and smell less fresh than they should, and any electronic devices can be irreparably damaged by heating them as this will warp the circuit boards. Planning the room out before installing the heating and then having these sections left out from the circuit will ensure you are not wasting money on heating the underside of your bath and potentially damaging possessions.

A radiator is also much more expensive than heating from below the floor – in order to raise the temperature to a comfortable level for the user, it will often need to be set at a higher temperature than an underfloor unit as it is harder for a wall-mounted radiator to uniformly heat the room.

With the design freedom, space saving aspect and the comfortable heating, not to mention the savings on energy bills, underfloor heating is something which many people find themselves looking into when redesigning a bathroom. Often available for far less than people expect, with easy installation options, more and more people are finding it the perfect solution for heating their room comfortably and efficiently while saving space.

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Thomas Pretty is an interior designer with many years of experience redesigning bathrooms. Find out more about underfloor heating at http://tilefixdirect.com/

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