Skip to main content
Home Improvement

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

9
  • 1
    That's a good point about "Depending on where the pipes run, some heat might be lost in useless places". In one of my earlier houses - a 2 story Victorian (or Four Square?), all the pipes ran along the inside of a wall (not the interior of the wall). So any heat lost by those pipes just went into heating a different room. Commented Jan 10, 2023 at 18:55
  • 2
    "If you get less heat because of air in the radiators" - Isn't that the core of the question: unless the radiator is completely empty, there will still be heat transfer, but at what point does that become an issue? Commented Jan 11, 2023 at 8:11
  • @user253751 Sure, but that doesn't make it less efficient. It's like trying to save water by installing low-flow faucets. If someone needs a gallon of water, they can get it, it'll just take twice as long. But a gallon of water still gets used. Same with one joule (calorie, therm, kilowatthour) of energy: if it gets from point A to point B, it gets there, it doesn't necessarily affect the efficiency. Unless by changing the transfer rate, more of it gets "lost in useless places", which I think is the key to the answer. Commented Jan 11, 2023 at 16:55
  • 1
    @SteveSummit thing is, the room being heated up is not a perfectly sealed container - energy is lost. If the energy source in the room is less efficient at heat transfer (ie the lower amount of water in the radiator coupled with the insulating properties of the air replacing the water), less energy is imparted to the room at any given moment - the room heats up slower or not at all, resulting in people trying to add more energy by increasing the water temperature. Making the heat transfer more efficient by increasing the volume of water means you dont need to impart more energy to the water. Commented Jan 11, 2023 at 23:45
  • 2
    @SteveSummit every water-filled-radiator-connected heating system I have ever used has had a temperature setting on the boiler that is independent of the thermostat in the room being heated (standard UK setup tbh) - thats the one which gets changed in my experience... Has the side effect of making the next person washing their hands yell swear words... Commented Jan 12, 2023 at 0:36