Kitchen Radiators and Heating Options

Kitchen heating wasn't a really problem in the dim and distant past since the kitchen would be used for cooking and the oven or stove would warm the room up, making radiators unnecessary.

But increasingly the kitchen is used as a family centre, particularly if it is a kitchen diner, and of course the oven isn’t used so much with microwave meals and convection ovens that put less heat out into the room. So trying to fit a radiator into a kitchen has become more of a priority.

Radiators are problematic in a kitchen though. The larger the room, the larger the radiator and the more space has to be given over to it.

Radiator positioning often puts limits on kitchen design because moving them is a tricky job, involving the repositioning of the inlet and outlet pipes. But there are some advances in heating technology that can help out.

Underfloor Heating for Kitchens

The first, best and most expensive is underfloor heating. A flexible tube is wound back and forth across the floor from the central heating pipework and then back again, basically like a stretched out flattened radiator. This is then covered with a screed and then the flooring of your choice, as long as it is compatible with underfloor heating.

Not only does underfloor heating give an even spread of warmth across the room but the temperature only has to be about fifty degrees, as opposed to the ninety degrees of a normal radiator, so it places less demand on energy resources. The side benefits, apart from being cosy and warm underfoot, are that there are no radiators so kitchen design is liberated, able to use the whole room.

There are electric mesh underfloor heating units available although products capable of heating larger rooms are relatively new to the market. The advantages are that you don't have to link them into the central heating plumbing circuit and they are thinner and flatter, so the floor level doesn't have to be dug down so far.

The disadvantage is that you will have to pay to heat the room on top of your normal central heating whereas fluid-filled underfloor heating uses the boiler that you are running anyway to warm the rest of the house.

There's also another benefit; some vertical radiators have the incoming and outgoing outlets next to each other. This makes them easier to work around if you have a ceramic or stone tiles floor, as you only have to make tricky cut-outs in one tile, not two.