Infra-Red Heating--Be Warned !!!

To me, infrared heating doesn't make a lot of sense if you're trying to make a house warm and cozy by heating the air.
Infrared will heat whatever solid objects it's shining on and won't really heat the air much at all.

Yeah there are various options to use solar into a buffer tank in combination with other heat sources which makes quite a lot of sense. On a sunny winters' day you'd get a huge % of your heat from the panels (Especially if you've enough roof to put plenty on as many Irish homes do).

On dull days, your gas / oil / wood pellet or whatever you're using would run more, but you'd still be saving a lot of money.

IR doesn't make a whole lot of sense at all though to me as you'd really need to heat the air, not the surfaces of objects.

I never understand why it's not done here as we tend to have extremely complicated central heating installations anyway! (certainly relative to your typical house in the UK which tends to just have a small system boiler/combi boiler and very little else).

From what I've seen of Irish heating systems, the majority use an indirectly heated hot water cylinder which uses a heat exchange coil that's taking heat from the central heating circuits much like a radiator and an electric element as back up / alternative when the heat's off.

In the UK direct-heated hot water has become more common with combi-boilers and electric showers. I'm actually not convinced that on-demand hot water's all that efficient or effective. I prefer the continental approach like in France where you've an ultra-highly insulated hot water cylinder that's capable of holding water and only losing a couple of degrees over 24 hours. Seems more logical to use the most efficient methods of heating, rather than peak-time electricity in the shower or gas systems that might not necessarily be all that efficient.

Mostly over there you heat the water at night using electricity (which is very cheap relative to here, possibly because of the big nuclear installations being unable to switch off at off-peak time so the power needs to get used up). Some homes might use gas or oil and solar during the day is very common nowadays.


I also never feel like an electric shower produces anything like the kind of water pressure / flow rates that a normal shower does. You can't control the temperature easily and if you stop the shower, they are scalding hot when you turn them back on again and freezing as the elements come to temperature. It's not exactly pleasant if you want to pause the shower for a moment to wash your hair. They're also very noisy if pumped and I just find them generally unpleasant.

I've never quite understood the British (and Irish) love-affair with them!

So, if you're adding solar, surely it means that the panels can dump heat into the cylinder and the oil/gas can be used to top it up on duller days / at night ?

Or, will no heat transfer happen if the tank's been heated by the central heating system already?

Electric showers were obviously designed as a cheap retrofit for houses that had no central heating. Something that was very common in Ireland and Britain but almost unheard of on the continent (weather's more extreme in winter).

The two countries also had the wonderful system of hot water storage: You keep it in a big uninsulated copper cylinder loosely wrapped in a lagging jacket that loses so much heat that it creates a 'hot press / airing cupboard' which is permanently at around 40ºC !

In most of the rest of Europe you just have a very seriously well insulated hot water tank that doesn't lose very much heat at all. So, you heat it and the water's available for showers all day and works extremely efficiently. If you heat a lot of the modern tanks, they'll still be hot two days later if you don't use the water.

The heating can be done with gas, oil, electricity, solar or whatever you like and it's probably a lot more efficient than attempting to heat water by passing it through an element in an instantaneous heater using up to 11kW of electricity at peak times.

The other thing I also find amusing is that British and Irish electrical regulations get absolutely paranoid about sockets and switches in bathrooms. Then think nothing about putting a 32amp circuit into a water heater located in the shower cubicle itself and it's only IP rated to X4 which is slash proof!!! It's not even rated for pressure jets!

Yet, at the same time they go mental about light fittings and sockets which really should be a non issue if all correctly RCD protected (as they are in most French bathrooms).

I know a few British friends of mine who were HORRIFIED to find a socket in the bathroom in France. It's also not unusual for the washing machine to be in the bathroom. However, millions of French people aren't being electrocuted and the protection is absolutely fine and millions of British bathrooms have a huge water-heater actually in the shower and nobody thinks that's weird at all.

I just find Irish and British plumbing can be a little eh, how would you put it.. "non scientific" in the way it's done. There's a lot of regulation and practice that seems to be based more on notional traditions than science.

Like why did we continue to fit sub-standard water mains and require attic tanks? Most European and north American supplies can produce about 3.0 bars and have a flow rate enough to service showers with enough water.
I could understand undersizing them 100+ years ago, but why did we continue to do that?

Why do we continue to fit separate hot and cold taps even in modern installations? You have to move your hands from scalding water to freezing water and nobody finds this odd/weird or strange...? Mixer taps are hardly rocket science !

Both the UK and Ireland also have had a long history of very, very minimal requirements for home insulation e.g. single glazing is still common in homes that were built as late as the 1980s.
There are just some very odd attitudes in these two islands to what I would consider very normal things that seem to have been seen as some kind of non-essential extras here. Yet, had they been done right day one, people would have much cheaper-to-heat and more comfortable homes!

Deleted User wrote: »

However I would say that Irish bathrooms tend to be small and maybe the thinking is that more can happen in a small bathroom ?

In my experience, most Irish bathrooms are significantly bigger than French ones. I don't buy that argument at all.
I'm not even sure if there's an "average" bathroom here. They vary from small to huge.