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RHM-C1 Heater

Coming from a city where summer is all year round and bedroom air conditioning units were never set above 25ºC, the concept of a room heater barely crossed my mind. Upon moving into my room in student halls at the cusp of a London winter, I quickly learnt the vast importance of a room heater – and the alarmingly ineffective one my room came equipped with.

Room heaters heat small spaces and are normally portable or fitted to a wall (Home Air. “7 Best Electric Wall Heaters - (Reviews & Buying Guide 2019).” Home Air, 26 Jan. 2020, www.homeair.org/best-electric-wall-heater-reviews/).

Wall-mounted heaters draw in cool air from the space around itself, spreading air over its metal fins to warm the air, which is then expelled through the top of the heater, warming up the environment (Home Air. “7 Best Electric Wall Heaters - (Reviews & Buying Guide 2019).” Home Air, 26 Jan. 2020, www.homeair.org/best-electric-wall-heater-reviews/.).

However, through the interior design of my room, much of the warm air expelled gets trapped between the space between the wardrobe and the bathroom wall, travelling upwards to a vacuum of space above the wardrobe. A percentage of this warm air lingers in the aforementioned space, and the remaining air travels through the room, towards the bed and the study table (areas of my room that I spend the most time in). But before the air can reach these pivotal spaces, it cools significantly and no longer produces a warming effect on me. The placement design of the heater has significantly changed the way I interact in the space of my room. I never open my room windows in hopes of trapping and insulating as much warm air as I can, to bring the average temperature of my room up to a comfortable level. I once foolishly tried to cover the tops of my heater with a large tube extending to my bed, hoping to channel the heated air through the tube directly to my bed. The latter of which proved to be rather ineffective and unsustainable.

In situations like these, the heater serves both social good and fictive bad functions. The design of the heater, isolated from this specific context, turns other heating devices such as lamps or candles obsolete by reducing the consumption of materials such as oil and fuel, increasing user efficiency by harnessing the building’s central electrical source. When the heater is placed in the context of my room however, it loses its practicality and challenges the user to interact with the heater and its setting in alternative ways (ref. my attempt of covering the heater with a long tube).

Understandably, the redundancy of the heater’s position is largely accounted for by the Victorian architecture of my student hall building, whereby old electrical wiring throughout the building may have left architects with little choice but to situate the heater in its present position.

I can't help but to imagine a world with heaters designed specifically for regenerated properties with electricity grids that restrict the placement of heaters to less efficient spaces in rooms. Perhaps heaters may curve around corners, or stretch out in various angles.

Or maybe it’s just time for me to order a portable heater off Amazon.