Picking the Right Infrared Lamp for Your Bathroom
Getting the wattage right for your bathroom heater is basically a balancing act. You want enough heat to actually feel it, but you don’t want to turn your bathroom into a sauna or waste a ton of money on your electric bill. We build our replacement lamps with an IP65 rating. In plain English? They’re sealed tight. Bathrooms get steamy, and moisture is the fastest way to kill a heating element. These keep the internals dry so you aren’t replacing them every few months.
Finding Your Sweet Spot
It really comes down to the size of the room. If you’re dealing with a tiny powder room—you know, those small spaces under 4 square meters—a 250W to 400W lamp is usually plenty. But if you’ve got a big master bath (8 square meters or more), you’ll want to jump up to 600W or 800W. Here’s the problem when you get it wrong: a weak lamp in a big room will just run forever, trying (and failing) to get the room warm. That’s a great way to burn out the filament. On the flip side, putting a massive heater in a tiny closet-sized bathroom is oppressive. It makes the thermostat freak out, clicking on and off constantly, which eventually wears down your electrical contacts.
Dealing with Steam
Steam is the enemy here. If your heating element isn’t sealed, moisture creeps into the terminals. That leads to corrosion, sparking, or just a dead heater. That’s why that IP65 seal is so important. The cool thing about infrared is that it doesn’t bother heating up all the air in the room. It sends out short-wave radiation that hits you and the walls directly. It’s fast. You step in, and you feel the warmth immediately.
One Last Thing: Check Your Wiring
More wattage means more power pulling through your walls. Before you pop in a high-power lamp, take a quick look at your circuit breaker and your wire gauge. If your wiring is too thin for the job, you’ll run into a “voltage drop.” It’s a frustrating glitch where you buy a 600W lamp, but because the wires can’t feed it enough juice, it performs like a 400W lamp. You’re paying for power you aren’t actually getting.