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Summer is the time for renovations and making homes even cozier and comfortable. If you are planning on changing something major about your place, you should definitely consider the radiators. Just like any other big aspect of your home, choosing the right radiators requires some rigorous calculations in means of necessary heat amount.
When renovating or building up a new house, most people have a tendency of choosing aluminum radiators because of their light weight and minimalistic aspect. We’re not trying to say these radiators are not proper for your home, but you should also consider their heat output capacity. For example, a cast iron radiator has the ability to retain heat for up to eight hours after central heating was turned off, as opposed to aluminum radiators that only last for a couple of hours. In what follows we will show you how you can determine the necessary heat output for your home by yourself.
If you have the option, consider hiring a specialist to take the exact measures for you. However, you can do this yourself if you are handy and have some basic notions on how to measure the space and do simple calculus. But let’s start from the beginning:
First thing you have to know is that the necessary heat output is determined by the size of the room and how isolated its outside walls are. The necessary amount of energy to heat a cubic meter of air in a room variates between 30W/cbm and 70W/cbm, according to your rooms outside isolation. In general, to this coefficient is given the empiric value of 50W/cbm, characteristic to a home with medium isolation. To calculate the necessary heat output, multiply this coefficient with the volume of air in the room (Volume = length of room x width of room x height of room). Once you have the necessary heat output for the room, you can go on choosing radiators, according to this metric.
It is advisable that, when choosing the radiators, you consider having the resulting heat output 10 percent higher than the necessary. This way you make sure you cover potential mis-calculus resulted from using the 50W/cbm coefficient presented before.