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

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.