Ever Thought About Electric Baseboard Heaters For Your Home?
Household heating has come a long way — from the very basic almost “primitive” wood-burning fire place, to the Franklin Stove, to the coal-fired boilers and finally to the modern day forced air systems.
Today, baseboard heaters have been around pretty much most of this time and are so commonplace that it’s almost impossible to find a house without them. They are called such because they are usually placed or installed on the floor and made to resemble a room’s baseboard, that bit of woodwork or plastic molding that come in between the walls and the flooring.
While they may seem simple enough, there are actually quite a number of different kinds of baseboard heaters, each delivering heated air in some unique way or the other. Let’s take a short look at these taken-for-granted fixtures up close and figure out what makes them tick.
Different Kinds Of Baseboard Heaters
One kind of baseboard heaters, which have been around since the 1940’s, are called hydronic since they use either heated water or some other liquid to warm air that is then circulated around the room. In a built-in or installed system, this liquid can first be heated in a boiler then pumped to baseboard units found in the rooms of the house.
In the baseboard units, the heated fluid “exchanges” their temperature with the cool air, the cooled fluid then returns via a different system of pipes back towards the boiler to be reheated, and the process is repeated. The boilers that heat the fluid in hydronic systems can either be gas fired or electrically operated.
There are also portable electric hydronic heaters that do not need to be installed while the house is being built, but rather they may be wheeled around and placed where they will be most effective. These can be plugged in any standard wall socket for operation and contain essentially the same elements as a centralized hydronic heating system, albeit in a smaller scale.
Another kind is an electric baseboard heater which is a way of heating the air around a room by using an electrical element. Basically, cool air is drawn through the base of the unit, either passively through convection or actively with a system of fans, and made to pass through the heated element.
The heated air is then pushed out through the top of the unit. These baseboard units can also be part of a centralized forced air system, which operate through a system of fans and installed ducts that circulate heated air around the house.