Infrared heating panels have been popping up in home improvement conversations with increasing frequency, and the pitch is appealing: no boiler, no pipes, no radiators, no major installation disruption. Just plug a panel in, mount it on the wall, and heat the room. Some installers are marketing them aggressively as an alternative to heat pumps, particularly to homeowners who balk at the disruption and cost of a full heat pump retrofit. To be honest, the reality is more complicated than that — but infrared isn’t without merit either.
What Infrared Heating Actually Does
Conventional central heating warms air, which then warms you and the objects in the room. Infrared heating works differently: it emits radiation at wavelengths that are absorbed directly by solid objects (walls, floors, furniture, people) rather than heating the air first. The result is that you feel warm more quickly than with convective heating, and a cooler air temperature can feel comfortable because your body and the room’s thermal mass are warmer.
This is similar to how sunlight feels warm even on a cold day — the air is cold, but the infrared from the sun warms you directly. Infrared panels exploit the same principle indoors.
The technology itself is mature and genuinely benign. Panels are typically rated between 150W and 1600W. You can get them as flat white panels (often mistaken for standard wall panels), mirror versions, or glass panels. Installation is straightforward: mount, connect to a power point, and add a thermostat or smart controller.
The Running Cost Reality
Here’s where the marketing gets optimistic. Infrared panels run on electricity, which in the UK currently costs around 24-25p/kWh under the Ofgem price cap. A heat pump, by contrast, is three to four times more efficient than direct electric heating — a 1kW heat pump output might use only 250-300W of electricity. An infrared panel producing 1kW of heat uses exactly 1kW of electricity.
This means that for equivalent heat output, running an infrared system will cost three to four times as much as a heat pump. For someone coming from a gas boiler, the comparison is less stark (gas is around 6p/kWh), but it still leaves infrared panels considerably more expensive to run than either gas or heat pumps.
Some infrared advocates argue that because you heat the thermal mass of a room rather than just the air, you can maintain comfort at a lower thermostat setting, reducing running time and therefore cost. There’s a kernel of truth in this — warm walls do feel more comfortable than cold walls with warm air. But the efficiency difference between infrared and heat pumps is large enough that this benefit rarely closes the gap.
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) does not cover infrared panels. There are no Ofgem-backed grants specifically for infrared heating. If budget is a constraint and you want grant support, a heat pump or biomass boiler are your options.
Where Infrared Can Make Sense
To be fair, there are genuine use cases where infrared panels are the right tool.
Supplementary heating in specific rooms: A home office, workshop, or garden room that needs occasional heating is a good fit. A single 600W panel on a timer can heat a small room quickly and cheaply without needing to extend your central heating system. The low capital cost and simple installation make this genuinely attractive.
Listed buildings and conservation areas: Heat pumps require planning consent in some conservation areas, and installation can be complex in listed buildings where drilling and pipework need careful management. Infrared panels fit on a wall like a picture frame and need only a power point. For a room in a listed property where you want to take the chill off without major works, that’s worth something.
Very well-insulated homes: The running cost argument for infrared improves significantly if your home is very well insulated, because the total heat load is low. In a Passivhaus-standard property where you might need only 20W/m² of heating, infrared panel running costs become much more manageable. The problem is that most UK homes needing heating system upgrades are not particularly well insulated.
Off-grid properties: If you’re generating your own electricity through solar and have excess capacity in winter (which is seasonal and rare), infrared panels give you a way to use that electricity for heating without the capital cost of a heat pump. A more common solution for such properties is a solar diverter to an immersion heater, but infrared is another option.
Comparing the Numbers
To make this concrete, let’s take a 90m² three-bedroom semi-detached UK home with moderate insulation — fairly typical. It might need around 8kW of heat on a cold day, requiring roughly 8,000-10,000 kWh per year for heating.
Running that on:
- Gas boiler: around £600/year at current prices
- Heat pump (COP 3): around £800/year at electricity prices
- Infrared panels (100% electric): around £2,400/year
That’s a £1,600/year difference between infrared and a heat pump — enough to buy a second-hand car over a decade. Even accounting for heat pump installation costs of £8,000-£12,000 (before BUS grant of £7,500), the payback on the heat pump over infrared is plausible within a decade.
For the supplementary office heating use case — say 500 hours per year of a single 600W panel — the annual cost is around £75. That’s genuinely affordable and the £200-400 capital cost of a panel is hard to argue with.
The Honest Assessment
Infrared panels are not a like-for-like replacement for a heat pump or gas boiler in most UK homes. The running cost difference is too significant for whole-home heating, and there’s no grant support to offset the higher operating costs.
Where they’re genuinely useful: single-room supplementary heating, difficult-to-retrofit spaces, and very occasional use scenarios. For whole-home primary heating, unless your house is extremely well-insulated or you have cheap electricity (off-peak tariff combined with solar), the numbers don’t add up.
If an infrared installer is telling you it’ll be cheaper than a heat pump to run, ask to see the kWh calculations — they rarely hold up. That’s not to say infrared is bad technology; it’s just misapplied when marketed as a heat pump alternative for typical UK housing stock.