Exactly how happy would I be to come home to this radiator every night? Very. I super-dig Wary Meyers and everything they do.
Photo from Wary Meyers
Inspiring Interiors
Wary Meyers gradient radiator.
Exactly how happy would I be to come home to this radiator every night? Very. I super-dig Wary Meyers and everything they do.
Photo from Wary Meyers
9 Comments
sort of on topic: what is your feeling about radiator heat vs. other sources? part of our building overhaul includes someday (probably not for at least 5 years) converting our heat from gas wall-mounted heaters (one in each room and not very attractive or effective) to solar heated radiators. do they effectively heat up a room? i do love how they look in an older space.
Well, I’ve lived with nothing but cast iron radiators for my entire adult life (in Rhinebeck we had a wood stove and a few electric wall heaters, if you can believe it!), so I don’t really have much to compare them to. I will say that they heat up the rooms very quickly, and it’s easy to put a pan of water on top if you want a little extra moisture in the air. The key to being happy with cast iron is keeping them well maintained. I think when people start to have problems is when valves get clogged with sediment, or when there’s an air pocket inside (that’s what causes “clanging”), etc. It’s easy to take care of this stuff when you own the house, not so much when you’re in an apartment. Our boiler is oil-fueled ($$$$$, ugh), but you wouldn’t have to deal with that side of the issue if you’re going solar at the same time.
I really wish YOU had a website for your house! It would be great to see all of the changes you’re (hopefully) making with the green roof, etc. Plus, I haven’t seen pictures in a long long time! I want to see that amazing kitchen again. 🙂
the truly tragic thing is that we lost ALL of our old renovation photos due to a computer crash. all of them. so only david and i are able to truly remember what we started with. fortunately we’ve now wised up to the world of flickr, so any new images will get posted in a public gallery there. in the meantime, our current renovations are only now starting to take shape, so we’ll likely be taking “before” photos any day now.
and just for you i will start taking some snapshots of our place and posting them to my own journal. things are much more lived in than when you saw them before.
[…] and plumbing themes popping up all over the blogosphere. Over at Door Sixteen, they featured this totally cool one and then over at Anh-Minh’s site there was this post on plumbing. And the […]
Hi, I own a house with a total of 10 radiators, some of which need repainting. Is there any special kind of paint one should use when repainting radiators, because they get hot and such? Or is it just regular old paint?
Tara, I just typed a whole reply to you and then Safari quit on me. Argh!
Anyway, here’s the deal with painting radiators: If you own your place, the best thing to do is to send them out to be sandblasted. Then you can prime them with a rust blocker and repaint them with high-heat enamel. They will look great and they won’t flake/chip for a long long time. If you’re renting (or are just exhausted/poor, like me), you need to first scrape off as much of the flaking paint as possible, clean them really really well, and then coat with a good primer (like BIN or Zinsser 123). You can just use regular paint like you’d use on the wall. It’s not dangerous, but it will chip and flake eventually. In the past, I’ve gotten a good 5 years out of a repainted (over paint) radiator painted with regular old paint before it started to chip/flake again. Not bad!
Thank you so much! Yes, I am poor/exhausted, so the scraping and priming optioniis for me. Maybe I’ll send a photo when finish one! By the way, my house is a two-family row house in Albany, NY built in 1840! So much to learn and do to care for it, but I love it.
I’m wondering why they didn’t also paint the valve on the bottom right of the radiator…
When it comes to plumbing, painting moving parts/threads/valves is generally a bad idea.