I have a bathroom that is right above the garage, and becomes extremely cold in the winter.
I have looked into a few options to help make the bathroom/shower a much more user-friendly winter room, and I am wondering if anyone who has also gone down this road can share what they learned along the way, and ultimately what direction they chose.
heating the floor - this would be a nice choice, however there are drawbacks as well, specifically I don’t want to tear apart my bathroom for a long period of time.
electric baseboard heat - I have one of these units in one of the rooms in my house, and it does a nice job. It heats the room quickly and quietly, however it takes up a lot more space than is available in the bathroom, which leads to
electric wall mounted heat - this looks like a small, square or rectangular wall-mounted unit, which will work nicely in my bathroom from a visual standpoint. But I have no experience with these units, and reviews on-line are all over the map.
there are also simple, plug in heaters (like the delonghi mica panel heater) which just plugs into a regular wall outlet and heats the air.
This 4th option seems to meet a number of issues (no need to cut a hole in the wall, tear up my floor, or run/fish wire within my walls and add a breaker to the breaker box in the basement), however I don’t know much about the heater itself, how economical it is, etc.
The bathroom is approx. 10’x15’, with one drawback… I have a skylight installed, and the peak of the bathroom ceiling has to be about 20’ high. Yes, it looks nice, but from a heating standpoint, it makes for an inefficient solution no matter what direction I take.
Any thoughts are appreciated. Right now, I am leaning toward option 4, to meet the short-term need. However, I’d like to pick a long-term solution as well, so if I can take care of it once (and correctly), that is what I’d prefer to do.
There is also the idea of a ceiling mounted heat lamp. That’s what my apartment has, and it’s okay. Better than nothing, anyway. (I live in a pretty warm part of the country.)
My sister uses a little plug-in electric thingie, about the size of a toaster – probably draws about the same wattage as a toaster – on a GFI circuit for safety. It has a little fan, and blows out a really comforting waft of nice hot air.
For serious heat without a lot of installation cost go with an electric baseboard or wall heater as you mention. A ceiling mounted heater in a fan or light unit will work to provide on demand heat, but not that much heat, you’ll start cold and it will take a while to warm up. I just went through this after a remodel and decided to route the hot water baseboards back through the bathroom again.
If the floor joists are open below (garage ceiling): Insulation batts, then cover (drywall/sheetrock) - a good start for finishing the garage.
That covers the ‘floor as a heat sink’ problem.
Unless you spend a great deal of time in the room, I’d just put in a free-standing electric heater - cheap, no installation, just plug in and place so it’'s pointing toward you.
You might want to look at some kind of temporary ceiling (sheet plastic) to reduce the convection loss.
You know, I am not exactly sure what is between my garage ceiling and the floor. The garage ceiling is “finished”, (which means it has sheet rock/drywall installed, and painted, with wires pre-installed for garage door openers, etc). The floor is your basic bathroom tile floor, and I assume that sits on top of the basic wooden pressed particleboard I’ve seen in home construction.
I have no idea what (if any) actual insulation is between the floor of my bathroom and the garage ceiling. But based on just eyeballing the distance, there cannot be much room in there for anything. My guess is whatever is in there was required by code, and I would not be surprised that if there was nothing but a bit of dead space between the floor and ceiling.
I don’t think the plastic sheeting would work as a long-term solution, and in the short term it would look pretty bad (if what I am envisioning you said correctly). If you are talking about basically lowering the ceiling with plastic sheeting, that would probably work (assuming I sealed the sheeting properly), but it would look like an in-progress home improvement project.
The room isn’t used a lot, but it IS the master bath, and one of the reasons it isn’t used much is because it is so cold in there in the winter months. We have a jacuzzi tub in there, but rarely use it because of the room temp. The vents in the room are pretty small (one in the small room with the commode), and one small wall-mounted vent about 12-14 feet up one of the walls.
Needless to say, that vent is basically useless in the winter months since warm air rises… It blows out over our head height, and heads right to the ceiling before we get to enjoy any of the heat.
The free-standing unit maybe the way I go this winter, but I really would like to put in a real solution to address this once and for all.
Not sure how something like this would work in my situation, since the ceiling actually has a peak about 20 feet up. That may require much more work than I’d want to invest.
Especially considering that heat rises; I don’t think you’d get much heat down by you, with the heating unit 15 feet over your head, while you’re sitting on the throne.
Electric wall or freestanding heater would be the way to go, I think. We have a wall heater in our basement bathroom and it makes the bathroom cozy quite quickly.
Long-term: How much do you love the 20’ ceiling height?
That is killing your attempts to heat - first, you heat the ceiling, then you start heating the air below it; eventually, the heat comes down to floor level.
A few 2x4’s and more drywall would give you a lower ceiling and make heating much easier. You would either lose the skylight or possibly build a shaft up to it.
So much for easy insulation of the floor - the ultimate would be a radiant floor heat, but that would be overly complex.
So, you’ve got heat coming in through vents that are above head height? They’re heating the void above the vents? Maybe a ceiling fan could help circulate that warm air down to the space you’d occupy?
We have a master bath too, though only a 7.5 foot ceiling.
We purchased a plug in heater. But bigger than a toaster. It’s taller. Works great.
I’m always leary of these things and fire danger though. We don’t leave it on during the day. You need a good place to put it that is not in the way and close to an outlet.
The first thing I would do is cut a small hole (big enough to get your hand in there) in the drywalled garage ceiling to see what the insulation situation is. If there isn’t any, I’d either hire someone to come blow in insulation, or just tear down the drywall in that area, insulate, and have it repaired. (This sounds expensive, but having a 10x15 area of drywall replaced really wouldn’t be bad.)
My other suggestion is an electric fireplace. We recently built one into our bedroom, and we love it. It has a 1500 watt heater, and you can use the “fireplace” part all year for ambiance. I found an antique mantle on Craigslist and we built the opening around that, but they make pre-built units if you’re not into construction work.
