Are the clothes absorbing some of the heat or do they absorb it and just release it anyway to your home so it doesn’t make a difference what is on top of the radiator.
In: Chemistry
technically, yes. The energy that would have otherwise gone to heating the air, then you, goes into vaporizing the water. In desert climates some houses still use this system to cool houses for much cheaper than air conditioning in a system called evaporative coolers. Water is trickled across some media that has lots of surface area but also allows air to flow across it freely. A fan draws air through the media and vaporizes the water cooling the air down. It requires much less energy than an air conditioner, but it only works in low-humidity areas of the country, where water is already scarce and it makes your house smell like a fish tank.
Some of the energy goes into turning the water into water vapor that can float away from the clothes, so it will warm the room air less. It also raises the humidity in the room. If some of that new water vapor in the air later condenses on a surface, it will slightly warm that surface. Neither one is a huge effect for one radiator full of damp clothes.
Your clothes are in the room, so all the heat from the radiator is entering your room. With dry clothes, they’ll hold some of that heat (y’know, cause they’re warm when you take them off) but probably not much. The heat is mostly in the air in between the fibers, and that’s not much compared to the volume of the room. It might slow down the room heating by keeping hotter air close to the radiator, instead of spreading out faster.
Wet clothes are a little different, because water can hold a lot of heat, so essentially more of the total heat added to the room will be in the clothes themselves. Further, it takes a certain amount of energy for water to shift from liquid to gas, that isn’t reflected in the temperature of the gas-water. So that’s some energy from the radiator that’s truly “lost”, as in not converted to heat.
There will be the same amount of heat in the room (from the radiator! The water will bring some extra heat into the room, even if it feels cold!). But it will feel hotter without the water, because the feeling of “hotness” doesn’t tell you how much heat (energy) there is in the room, but how much your body absorbs (from the air). Water has a high energy capacity, which means that it will absorb a lot of energy before giving off any. Air on the other hand has a low energy capacity. Air that feels hot may have less heat/energy than water that still feels cold.
2. things
1. Heating and drying these clothes takes energy, you basically have “more room” to heat up, thus increasing energy needed.
2. The clothes are essentially blocking the heat from being released at least momentarily, it will eventually disperse but your radiator doesn’t know that, it has a temperatur sensor usually on the handle, but if that one doesn’t get hot, the radiator doesn’t stop heating. So this could lead to your room becoming hotter than you’d want it, which increases the amount of heating you have done.
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