Infrared heating for garden offices

It's a bit nippy out there and as one of the most common queries we get here at Shedworking is about how to keep your garden office cosy, we asked Heather Edwards from Multiheat & Energy Systems for her thoughts on the subject.

"Infrared warms people directly," she explains, "the far infrared panel heaters provide very gentle and comfortable warmth, unlike the intense near infrared orange glowing type of infrared heater which is better for outdoor applications."

Multiheat has been supplying infrared heaters for more than 10 years, and Heather says the market has changed quite a lot over that time as people are far more aware of their energy consumption and more accepting of different technologies and new ways of doing things. 

"Infrared heating is a well established technology, that has been widely used across Europe for around 40 years, it is popular because it is a more efficient way of warming people, and especially in buildings which are not so well insulated, simply because it is not reliant upon heating the air," she says. "Heating air to be lost through poorly insulated walls is just wasteful of energy. In a well insulted building the running cost of an infrared panel is very low. Panel heaters range from 300 to 850 watts which is incredibly low compared to plug in oil filled radiators, storage heaters or fan heaters which can be 1500 to 2000 watts."

So what is infrared? Here's how Heather explains it:

It is an energy we are all very familiar with, our bodies naturally absorb and emit infrared warmth. Natural infrared is the warmth we feel from the sun, infrared energy travels through air and only turns to heat upon touching a surface, so we all know when you sit in the sun even on a spring day you can feel the sun’s infrared energy on your face, this energy also warms the earth, sand on the beach and stone walls of the house. In winter there are fewer daylight hours, less time for that energy to warm surfaces, and so we become surrounded by coldness and we perceive a chillyness. So, thinking of this principle, by using infrared heating in our well insulated buildings we can maintain a good warmth in the walls and furnishings which makes us perceive a cosy feeling, even if the air might not be as warm as we might think, in uninsulated buildings we still can feel that far infrared direct warmth on our faces.

The result is that infrared warmth is not hot, stuffy,or dry, just effective. 

"The great thing about infrared is that the heater wants to be higher on the wall or even on the ceiling," adds Heather, "so we do very slim white panels, or pictures or mirrors which are heaters."

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