How to actually pick the right infrared heater for your bathroom
Here is the secret to bathroom heating: more power isn’t always better. If you just buy the biggest lamp you can find, you’re probably just going to bake yourself alive in a tiny powder room and waste a ton of electricity. On the flip side, putting a weak little lamp in a huge master bath is basically pointless. You’ll be out of the shower and dressed before the room even feels lukewarm. It’s all about the size of the space. For the small rooms(think under 4m²), a 400W to 600W shortwave lamp is usually plenty. The great thing about shortwave IR is that it doesn’t bother trying to heat up all the air in the room first. It just hits your skin and the surfaces around you. It’s instant. You flip a switch and you’re warm. No ten-minute wait. If you’ve got a medium or large bathroom(somewhere between 6m² and 12m²), you’ll want to bump that up to 800W or 1200W. Just be careful. If you go too high in a tight space, you might trip your circuit breaker or end up with “hot spots” that make the room feel uneven and uncomfortable. But before you go shopping, there’s a practical side to this. Higher wattage means more stress on your wiring. If you’re living in an older home, you really should check your wire gauge before you install a high-power array. You don’t want to overload your system just to get a warm toe. If I were setting this up, here is how I’d do it: ***Tiny space:**Just one 500W lamp. Simple. ***Medium space:**Either one 800W lamp or two 400W lamps. ***Large space:**Two 600W lamps, placed to cover the areas where you actually spend time. I usually lean toward using two smaller lamps instead of one monster unit. Why? Because it spreads the heat around. You avoid that “blast furnace” feeling right under the lamp while the corners of the room stay freezing. It just feels more natural.