Summer is here, and we’re all itching to get outside. How can we make sure our outdoor spaces stay comfortable, no matter the weather?

We’ve put together this quick guide to making your outdoor heating more effective and a lot greener!

Read more

Use Wind Breaks And Insulation

An outdoor space will never be as insulated as an indoor one, or else it wouldn’t really be an outdoor space! However, it’s well worth looking into how your space is designed, and if there’s any ways you can reduce the amount of cold air getting in. This will make any source of heat a lot more effective.

For example, does your decking area look a bit like a wind tunnel? It could be funnelling cold air directly to you!

If you can place your seating area near one of your external walls or a fence, this can be a massive help in terms of preventing wind getting to you. You could also add drapes, or a vinyl awning to your exposed sides.

It may also be worth seeing if a roof could be added to the top of your sitting area. Heat rises, and something covering your head can help keep that warmth closer to you!

Use Radiant Heat

There’s another way to get around wind chill. It’s IR Heaters!

Trying to actively heat the outdoors is a fool’s errand, which is why patio heaters are often assumed to be uneconomical, bad for the environment and not particularly effective.

However, IR heaters are a little different. These heaters produce radiant heat as opposed to convection heat. That means they fire out rays of infrared radiation into the room, instead of warming air in a cycle like a traditional heater. These rays penetrate the objects and people, warming them up from the inside.

In simple terms, this means radiant heat warms you as opposed to the world around you. This makes it an ideal choice for outdoor use, as you won’t have to fight against nature to stay warm.

The rays of infrared are also much less impacted by winds, so you won’t find all your freshly generated warmth being blown away!

Don’t panic about the word radiation by the way, infrared heat is perfectly safe. In fact, it’s the exact same energy you experience when you step out into the sun- minus any harmful UV radiation.

Calculate Your Needs

Because they have a pretty clear ratio of power in to heat out, calculating how many IR heaters you need for a specific space is pretty simple!

Firstly, you need to know the volume of the area you’re trying to warm in feet. Multiply the length of the area by the width, then take the resulting number and multiply it by the height of the space. If you’re using one of our wall mounted heaters, use the height you want to place it at for this calculation.

If your space doesn’t have a roof and you’re going for a freestanding heater, 2.4m is a good average to go off of, although bear in mind this may hamper the accuracy of your calculations.

Once you have the volume of your space, we can work out how many watts you’ll need. For a poorly insulated room, we’d need 35 watts per mᶾ to be warm enough. This is easy to work out, just take the volume of your space and multiply it by 35!

However, even with wind breaks, an outdoor space won’t have much insulation. To counteract this, we’ll triple the number of watts required, which

In practical terms…

Let’s say you have a decking area that’s 3 meters by 3 meters, with a wall that’s about 2.4m high. This is a good starter deck that’s great for hosting. The volume of this space would be 21mᶾ. Then we multiply this number by 35 to get 756 watts. We’ll then triple that number to counteract the difficulties of heating the outdoors to get 2,268 watts.

The 2400W Aurora Wi-Fi Remote Controllable Infrared Bar Heater would be the perfect choice for this patio, with a few extra watts to spare to counteract really chilly days

Alternatively, you could split that wattage between two 1200W Aurora Wi-Fi Remote Controllable Infrared Bar Heaters to create a spread of heat, which is a particularly good choice if your decking area isn’t a uniform shape, or if you want to move around it more.

It’s always worth remembering that radiant heaters heat you, not the air around you. That means they’re at their most practical when they’re pointing at you. Therefore, carefully placing the heaters you buy to ensure an even spread of heat is a more effective plan that pointing them all at one spot.

Want more guidance? You can get in touch with us by giving our team a call on 0116 321 4124, or sending us an email at sales@suryaheating.co.uk.

You can also check out our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages for more details or head over to our YouTube channel to learn more about Infrared Heating.