bathroom heater

[kerosenedrvr]

Does anyone have a recommendation for an electric bathroom heating unit. I am most interested in a ceiling mount unit. I prefer to not have the light/fan/heat combination in part because I already have two of these units (just no heat) and also because the bathroom is rather large. I believe my square footage is around 350. I've looked at nu-tone and several other manufacturers but nothing seems to be ideal. I do have central heat but prefer to keep the rest of the house cooler, but step out of a hot shower into a warm room...Any suggestions are very much appreciated.

[egon]

Maybe Radiant overhead heater is what you are looking for.

Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Pat]

kerosene, I have hydronic heat in my tile shower floor and walls as well as the bathroom floor and a hydronic towel warmer. Pretty sweet.

At my previous house I remodeled the bathroom and installed several heat lamps in angled soffits on a twist timer. Plenty of radiant heat and you couldn't forget and leave it running. I built soffits where the ceiling met the walls by adding a hypotneuse to the other two sides of the right triangle (walls and ceiling.) There are recessed lamp holders approved for heat lamps (250 Watts each.) It was very nice. There is only a fraction of a second between turning the timer knob and luxurious radiant heat beaming down on you like a warm day at the beach.

I went with hydronics in the new house but in retrospect it IS NOT neccessarilly an improvement over the heat lamps as far as the "exiting the shower" situation is concerned. My bathroom tile floors are heated but I could stand to have some temporary extra radiant heat aimed at my wet body for a few minutes while toweling off. (Maybe a retrofit for heat lamps is in the works.)

I use a programmable T'stat to turn the hydronics on in the shower for the time period when I am most likely to want heat, starting hours in advance as the time constant is long. For that extra heat on your wet body to combat the evaporative cooling effect I believe a fast rise time electric solution is superior. There are electric panels that can be installed like sheetrock in the ceiling and they heat pretty fast but unless you object to the heat lamp approach on some kind of aesthetic grounds, I think the lamps are better. There are parabolic (sort of) reflector type heaters with coils of wire that glow when energized that you can install overhead but I don't like them as much as heat lamps. For one reason dust and lint always gets on the element and stinks when it burns off if you don't use the unit very frequently. As I recall they are more expensive than a collection of high wattage sockets and heat lamps too.

Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] ZOWIE! I had never THOUGHT of an angled soffit! Wot an idea! Just goes to show you how strong and how high the sides of "the box" can be sometimes.....and here I thought I was one of the reeeeely innovative types. [img]/forums/images/icons/blush.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Dave, Depending on your architectural aesthetic tastes and extant conditions of space and proportion at the soffit site, you may want to consider starting what looks like a traditional rectangular "layer cake" soffit but put an angled dog leg in place of the corner that sticks out into the room. This dog leg would have to be large enough to accomodate your recessed heat lamp fixtures and bezel.

You can juggle the proportions to see what appeals to you, everything from just adding a hypotneuse to the ceiling's and wall's right angle to an almost rectangle with the smallest dog leg that accomodates your heat lamps. There isn't anything really special about heat lamps, all tungsten fillament bulbs are approximately equal in heating ability (given equal watts) since they convert so little of the electrical energy to visible light.

If you prefer you can use more but smaller bulbs with the same total Watts you want. You can bank switch the bulbs if you think you might want to use heat in the summer but not as much. Just put a switch down stream of the timer so you can kill a fraction of the lights or you can get a HD dimmer and adjust for the heat ouitput you want (my personal fav) I considered putting in a column in the corner of the bathroom (vertical soffit) with heat lights all down it just slightly recessed to avoid contact with any body parts but ouir corner was too crowded. If you have room this is a great thing to have as it gets heat down lower where you don't get as much from the ceiling level.

You can use spots in place of floods for the lamps whose lamp to body part distance is a tad much. A side benefit might be reduction of SAD.

Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[egon]

<font color="blue"> </font color> </font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
soffit site

[/ QUOTE ] <font color="blue"> </font color>

Arrgh, built the ceiling crooked ehh me bye!!

Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] The problem that I have is that we have a long angled couch in the corner of our living room, and it is a very good couch, and it has multi-multi-multi recliners that pop out in various places and they are very comfy so we love sitting on the couch EXCEPT that we CAN'T SEE TO READ. The living room has an overhead light/fan that shines right in your eyes when you try to read while sitting on the couch, and the big window behind one half of the angle couch only provides light during certain hours of the day. I was going to build a soffit that had a vertical measurement of somewhere around 4" and a horizontal of maybe seven inches. That soffit would be too shallow to accomodate "can" lights so i was looking for some sort of surface fixtures to hang on it. Forget hogging holes in the existing ceiling because it is lath and plaster with a drywall overlay. I do have wiring in the wall up next to the existing ceiling that I put in there four years ago and it connects to an unused switch that I put in four years ago when we did a LR remodel, thinking that I might someday want valence lighting. My thinking now is that if I went with an angled soffit, I could use "eyeball" fixtures and tilt the eyes downward to get the angle on the couch that I need. The body of the triangle could be big enough to accommodate the mass of the recessed lighting fixture. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Dave, In my previoius house I had a ceiling mounted light fixture with three gimbaled lamps that could be independently aimed. I lamped it with spot lights and installed an RF based remote control on/off/dimmer. It remembered the last dimmer setting. Anyway, when a TV commercial came on I muted the TV and hit the light control. Due to the distance away the spot size totally covered the area of interest where I could hold reading material. The second gimballed light was aimed for my wifes recliner to support her reading and the third was lamped with a flood for general illumination as visual comfort is reduced if the contrast between intensity levels in your field of vision vary too greatly.

In your case there are lots of aimable lights available ranging from the eyeball you mention to various gimballed track lights (both high and low voltage.) There are some pretty good CFL's in reflector styles now which might be of interest. Lowe's had retrofit kits for can lights that included a new style dimable ballast and a socket for a CFL (not medium base but multi-pin.) These ballasts are made to be dimmed with a standard tungsten style lamp dimmer and so they would work fine with the RF linked remote control so you could adjust your lighting without getting up and down a lot. Of course, it would work well without the CFL but I thought you might want the cooler running energy efficiency of the CFL. The can light retrofit kits were $39.95 but who knows you might buy elsewhere at a better price.

Pat