When you have the heating on and you have wet clothes on the radiators, dry clothes or nothing, does it impact the amount of heat dispersed to heat your home?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.