Nothing on the walls. Heat only the rooms you use. Slim white PowerBoard panels on the ceiling warm people and everything in the room directly, instead of heating the air first. Supplied and installed across the UK.
True, and it is the big one. A kWh of electricity costs roughly four times a kWh of gas. Infrared only wins on running cost through zoning (heating occupied rooms instead of the whole house), the dropped gas standing charge, zero servicing and radiant comfort at a lower air temperature. In a home where whole-house gas heating is already cheap, a small well-insulated new build with a new boiler, infrared may not save you money without a battery and off-peak tariff.
Think twice if: you have a nearly-new A-rated boiler in a small, well-insulated home and no plans for solar or a battery.
Radiant heat warms surfaces and people, which helps in draughty rooms, but no heating system beats physics: a leaky, uninsulated home loses heat faster than any system can affordably replace it. If your home is EPC F or G, insulation is a better first pound than any new heating.
Think twice if: your home has no loft insulation and single glazing, and you cannot address either.
Infrared works partly by line of sight. A badly placed panel behind a wardrobe or above a tall bookcase warms furniture, not you. This is why we size and place panels from a heat-loss survey rather than guessing, and why ceiling mounting works so well: the ceiling sees the whole room.
Plan around it: unusual room shapes and very high ceilings (over about 3 metres) need proper panel placement, not guesswork.
A boiler swap is one big box; infrared is panels in every room you heat, plus thermostats. For a whole house the hardware usually costs less than a full gas installation, but if you only compare against "keep limping the old boiler along", infrared costs more up front. The flip side: you can convert room by room and spread the cost, which no boiler lets you do.
Plan around it: budget per room, or start with the rooms you use most and extend later.
People used to convection radiators sometimes find the first week odd: the air reads cooler on a thermometer while you feel warm, the way low winter sun does. Most people come to prefer it, drier air, no dust circulation, even warmth, but "different" is honest.
Worth knowing: give it a week before you judge it, and set thermostats by comfort rather than by the number you used with radiators.
Each panel draws 250 to 750 watts. A typical home’s supply handles a zoned system comfortably because panels cycle rather than all running at once, but a very large all-electric conversion needs the electrician to confirm your consumer unit and supply are up to it. That check is part of the sign-off anyway.
Plan around it: older fuse boards may need upgrading first, your electrician will tell you in minutes.
Infrared panels heat rooms, not water. If you are removing a combi boiler you still need a plan for hot water, usually an efficient cylinder with an immersion heater or a small point-of-use heater, and that is a real extra cost a boiler quote does not have. We flag it at the survey so it never arrives as a surprise.
Plan around it: budget for hot water separately when replacing a combi, and ask the survey to include it.
Tap any drawback to read it in full. The whole list is summarised in the table below.
The same seven, in one honest table: who each one actually affects, what mitigates it, and whether it should stop you buying.
If any of these is you, we will say so at the survey stage. An unhappy customer costs a small Welsh company far more than a missed sale does.
See the like-for-like cases: replacing storage heaters, vs oil and LPG, vs gas and vs heat pumps.
Infrared is not the only system with drawbacks, and pretending otherwise is how heating gets mis-sold. The full 30-year cost workings are on our cost comparison page.
The free remote heat-loss survey is where the honesty gets specific: your rooms, your insulation, your tariff, and a straight answer on whether infrared beats what you have now. If the numbers do not work for your home, the survey says so and costs you nothing.
You will be dealing with a founder-run Welsh company, and the founder is a qualified electrician who designed the panel. Hard questions are welcome, he has heard them all on site.
Free remote survey, no pressure, and we will call you back within one working day.
Enter your details for a fast callback from our Disadvantages Guide team.
It depends on what you are replacing. Replacing storage heaters, oil, LPG or an ageing gas system in a reasonably insulated home: usually yes, on both comfort and running cost. Replacing a nearly-new efficient gas boiler in a small well-insulated home: often not on cost alone, unless you pair it with a battery on an off-peak tariff or solar. We publish exactly how we calculate this, and the free remote heat-loss survey gives you the like-for-like answer for your own home.
The genuine ones: underestimating panel count for a poorly insulated room (fixed by surveying rather than guessing), badly placed panels warming furniture instead of people, and sticker shock at electricity unit rates when the system is run like a convection system instead of zoned. All three are avoidable with honest sizing and room-by-room thermostats.
Each panel draws 250 to 750 watts while heating, far less than a 3kW fan heater, and panels cycle with the thermostat rather than running flat out. The realistic question is monthly cost, which depends on your home and tariff: our running costs page has a calculator that works it out for your rooms, and with zoning most homes only heat the rooms they are actually using.
The opposite, usually. Radiant heat warms walls and surfaces directly, which keeps them above the dew point and reduces the cold spots where condensation forms. It will not fix a building defect like a leaking gutter or rising damp, but compared with convection heating it typically reduces surface condensation.
It heats whole houses, and that is where zoning pays off most: a typical modern 3-bed semi needs around 22 x 250W concealed ceiling panels, or 10 to 14 higher-output 500W/750W surface-mounted panels, with a thermostat per room. Plenty of customers start with one or two rooms and extend, because panels work independently of any existing system. The free remote heat-loss survey sizes the whole house properly.
Because over-promising erodes trust exactly when it matters, at the point you decide. PoweRad is a founder-run Welsh company; the founder is a qualified electrician who designed the panel. If infrared is not right for your home we would rather say so at the survey stage than have an unhappy customer, and everything we claim traces to a published model.
Every percentage we claim anywhere on this site traces to one conservative model, published in full at how we calculate savings. Running costs for your rooms are on the running costs page, installation costs on the installation cost guide, and the deeper reading lives in the education hub.
Size a system yourself and see the numbers, or book a free remote heat-loss survey, and if infrared is the wrong answer for your house, we will tell you that too.