Lose the oil for a friendlier way to heat a room
At this point, turning up the central heating for the whole house becomes non-sensical and who wants to go room-to-room turning down the all the radiators except one.
Far easier to use a portable electric radiator which can silently warm the room, perfect if you are in the home office, watching TV or looking to keep the bedroom that bit warmer through the night.
Traditionally portable radiators are filled with oil, which is warmed up slowly and then gives off continuous heat as long as it is operating, before slowly losing heat once the power is cut. The downside is that these radiators can be pretty heavy, and aren’t especially eco-friendly when they come to the end of their life.
At Dimplex, we have taken a highly innovative approach to portable radiators by completely removing the oil, in fact, any fluid, and the advantages might just surprise you.
For starters, oil-free radiators, on average are around 10% lighter, so are that much easier to move around the house, and you don’t need to worry about ruptures or leaking pressurised oil if it takes a knock.
An oil-free radiator will also warm up a room faster than their oil-filled equivalents. In tests a Dimplex 2kW EvoRad2BTA warmed a room from 9°C to a toasty 22°C 11 minutes and 57 faster than a leading manufacturer’s 2kW oil-filled radiator – that’s 17% faster. Then, when running for five hours before switching off, a Dimplex oil-free column radiator used 385w less energy to reach and maintain the desired temperature. Saving 9% of the energy used to warm a room would be the equivalent of nearly 60kW over a typical five-month period spanning autumn and winter. Tested under the same parameters, the Dimplex 2kW Cadiz, a covered oil-free radiator, is even more impressive, using 929w or 20% less energy to achieve the same effect. And less energy used, means less cost to run.
Oil-filled radiators do cool down more slowly, but the difference is pretty negligible. Once turned off, the tested column radiators were timed to see how long it took for the heat to drop from 25°C to 18°C. The oil-free radiator took two hours to cool down, the oil-filled a slightly longer two hours 24 minutes. But don’t forget, you are more likely to want to warm your room faster than worry about it cooling once you have switched off the heating.
The latest range of oil-free portable electric radiators from Dimplex come in a choice of sizes, styles and prices to match your needs – from the tiny 700w Eco Chico to the EvoRad with intelligent Eco-Heat settings, and the powerful 2kw and 3kW Cadiz radiators boasting electronic climate control and remote-control operation. All this and oil-free radiators have a smaller carbon footprint than their oil-filled equivalents, so you can feel warm both outside and in with the knowledge that you are doing your bit for the environment.