There’s nothing like having a room in your house where you spend a great deal of time unclothed and wet to remind you that you need a heater. Bathrooms are popular choices for additional heat because, even in a house with central heating, it can still get chilly in there in the winter, and if your house does not have central heating, the bathroom may as well be an ice locker in January. But the problem with finding a good bathroom heater, as with most situational heating needs, is knowing what sort of heater to get among all of the options out there. What type of heater should you get for your bathroom? What sort of things should you look for? We’ll discuss that and more in this article.
Bathroom Heaters
The ideal bathroom heater is going to do several things. Even, consistent heating throughout the whole room would be nice, as you don’t want one side of the room to be much warmer or cooler than the other side. An automatic thermostat would also be nice to help keep the bathroom at a comfortable temperature. Also, since there are likely to be clothes and towels strewn around the room, you don’t want a heater that poses any sort of fire hazard (not to mention the potential for burning exposed, um, body parts). And lastly, efficiency and convenience are never a bad thing when it comes to choosing a heater.
These criteria all point towards one particular type of heater that would make the ideal bathroom heater: an electric convection heater. Convection heaters do all of the things listed above: they provide consistent heat throughout all the corners of the room, they almost always come equipped with an automatic thermostat, they are designed to be cool (or at worst, warm) to the touch even when in use, and they are both efficient and convenient to use. The benefits of using electric bathroom heaters is pretty obvious too – you don’t have to worry about getting a gas or propane hookup in your bathroom, and you can just use the plugs that are already in there.
The type of heater that I’ve described here is most likely going to be a small, portable heater, which adds to its usefulness and convenience. You could use it to heat your bedroom at night and then use to heat your bathroom during the day. The only disadvantage to convection heaters is that they can take a while to heat a room, due to the way in which they work. One way to get around this problem is to use a fan heater, which is a type of convection heater that uses a fan to speed up the heating process. An electric bathroom fan heater will most likely solve all of your bathroom heating needs.
Bathroom Wall Heaters
Another option for bathroom heating, if you don’t want to use a portable heater, is to get a wall heater permanently installed in your bathroom. In this situation, since the bathroom wall heater will be in a permanent spot and will be positioned well above the floor, a radiant heater might work just as well as a convection heater. The big advantage to radiant heaters is that they heat a room much more quickly than convection heaters do, so you could turn it on when you step into the shower, and the room would feel nicely warm by the time you got out. The two main disadvantages to radiant heaters are that they don’t heat a room evenly – you’re going to feel much more heat closer to the heater than further away – and the heating elements of radiant heaters are usually exposed to give off more heat. If you were to bump into or accidentally touch a radiant heater, you could get burned.
If you don’t like the sound of all of that, you can get convection bathroom wall heaters as well. These will work in just the same way as portable convection heaters, but will be permanently mounted on your wall.
Also, if you have access to a convenient gas or propane supply, and prefer to use one of them for your heating, you can get either of these wall heaters in that variety. You may need to get a professional to install it, but a gas or propane bathroom heater would work just fine.
Bathroom Heater Light
One question that I’m often asked is some variation of “What’s that heater light I saw in the bathroom of my hotel?” That light is a specific type of electric radiant heater and is very similar to a heat lamp used for keeping food warm. The ceiling is a great place for putting radiant bathroom heaters, as they are in a good position to heat the room, and it’s hard to get close enough to burn yourself. If you want a heater light in your bathroom at home you’ll need to get a professional to install it, but they can be used in home bathrooms just like in a hotel.