How much does infrared heating cost to run? Room by room
Rough guide to what infrared heating costs to run per hour, per day and per season, for each room and for a whole home. Estimates, with the sums shown.
Here’s a question that sounds simple and turns out not to be: what does it cost to keep a room warm?
You’d think the answer would be printed on the heater. It isn’t, and it can’t be, because the heater is only half of the story. The other half is the room, the house around it, the weather outside, and you. Especially you. Whether you like it at 19 °C or 23 °C, whether you work from home or are out all day, whether you shut the bedroom door. The heater just does what it’s told.
So let’s start with the punchline and then take it apart. In a typical renovated home, heating a bathroom with infrared costs around 10 cents a day. A bedroom, around 33 cents. A living room kept warm through the evening, around €1.17. And heating a whole 90 m² home for ten hours a day comes to roughly €1,000 over a winter.
Now, the small print, which in this case is actually the big print. Every number in this article is an estimate, the heater sizes included. They describe a typical home, and nobody lives in a typical home. What you really need and pay depends on where you live, how well your house holds on to heat, your windows, your draughts, how warm you like it and how you use each room. Treat these figures as a way of getting a feel for the costs. If you want numbers you can actually plan around, have a professional look at your project. We do that for free: send us your floor plan.
What the numbers are built on
First, and by a wide margin the most important: how leaky the house is. A house is, in a sense, a bucket with holes in it, and heating is the tap you use to keep it topped up. A well-insulated house is a bucket with a few pinholes. An old, draughty one is closer to a colander. Same tap, wildly different amounts of water. Here are the five kinds of bucket we work with:
| Type of home | Heater size needed (approx.) | Once the room is warm, the heater is on |
|---|---|---|
| Passive house | 30 watts per m² | 20% of the time |
| New build | 50 watts per m² | 25% of the time |
| Renovated | 75 watts per m² | 30% of the time |
| Partly renovated | 100 watts per m² | 35% of the time |
| Older home, not renovated | 120 watts per m² | 40% of the time |
Second, how the heater actually behaves. When you switch a room on, the heater goes flat out for about half an hour to bring it up to temperature. After that it settles down, and the thermostat flicks it on and off just often enough to replace the heat that’s leaking away. So for most of the time you’re in the room, the heater is mostly resting. (That last column in the table is how much of the time it’s working.)
Third, the price of electricity. We use €0.29 per kWh, which is what households across the EU paid on average in the second half of 2025. A kWh, or kilowatt hour, is the unit on your electricity bill: a 1,000 watt heater running for one hour uses one of them.
Fourth, how long winter lasts. We assume 210 days of heating a year. If your winters are longer or shorter, the costs per winter stretch or shrink to match.
What it costs per hour
The arithmetic here is reassuringly dull. A heater costs its power multiplied by your electricity price for every hour it runs flat out. A 1,000 watt heater at €0.29 per kWh costs 29 cents an hour. That’s all.
But remember, it doesn’t run flat out for long. Here’s roughly what a 10 m² room costs, starting from cold:
| Type of home | Heater size (approx.) | First half hour, warming up | Each hour after that |
|---|---|---|---|
| Passive house | 300 W | about €0.04 | about €0.02 |
| New build | 500 W | about €0.07 | about €0.04 |
| Renovated | 750 W | about €0.11 | about €0.07 |
| Partly renovated | 1,000 W | about €0.14 | about €0.10 |
| Older home, not renovated | 1,200 W | about €0.17 | about €0.14 |
Notice that warming the room up is the expensive part. Keeping it warm is cheap, because by then you’re only paying to replace what leaks out. A bigger room scales up in the obvious way: twice the floor, roughly twice the cost.
What each room costs
Now for the rooms people actually live in. Each of these is heated only while someone’s in it, which turns out to matter enormously, as we’ll see. And once more, because it’s worth repeating: these are estimates for a typical room. Yours will be different, possibly quite different.
Bathroom: 5 m², heated 2 hours a day
| Type of home | Heater size (approx.) | kWh a day | Per day | Per winter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passive house | 150 W | 0.12 | €0.03 | €7 |
| New build | 250 W | 0.22 | €0.06 | €13 |
| Renovated | 375 W | 0.36 | €0.10 | €22 |
| Partly renovated | 500 W | 0.51 | €0.15 | €31 |
| Older home, not renovated | 600 W | 0.66 | €0.19 | €40 |
Bedroom: 12 m², heated 3 hours a day
| Type of home | Heater size (approx.) | kWh a day | Per day | Per winter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passive house | 360 W | 0.36 | €0.10 | €22 |
| New build | 600 W | 0.68 | €0.20 | €41 |
| Renovated | 900 W | 1.13 | €0.33 | €69 |
| Partly renovated | 1,200 W | 1.65 | €0.48 | €100 |
| Older home, not renovated | 1,440 W | 2.16 | €0.63 | €132 |
Home office: 10 m², heated 8 hours a day
| Type of home | Heater size (approx.) | kWh a day | Per day | Per winter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passive house | 300 W | 0.60 | €0.17 | €37 |
| New build | 500 W | 1.19 | €0.34 | €72 |
| Renovated | 750 W | 2.06 | €0.60 | €126 |
| Partly renovated | 1,000 W | 3.12 | €0.91 | €190 |
| Older home, not renovated | 1,200 W | 4.20 | €1.22 | €256 |
Living room: 25 m², heated 6 hours a day
| Type of home | Heater size (approx.) | kWh a day | Per day | Per winter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passive house | 750 W | 1.20 | €0.35 | €73 |
| New build | 1,250 W | 2.34 | €0.68 | €143 |
| Renovated | 1,875 W | 4.03 | €1.17 | €246 |
| Partly renovated | 2,500 W | 6.06 | €1.76 | €369 |
| Older home, not renovated | 3,000 W | 8.10 | €2.35 | €493 |
Stare at that living room for a moment, because it’s the most interesting thing in this article. The same room, the same kind of heater, the same evenings on the sofa. And it costs about seven times as much in an old, unrenovated house as in a passive house. The heater didn’t change. The bucket did.
What a whole home costs
So what if, instead of heating rooms one at a time, you heat the entire 90 m² house at once, either for ten hours a day or around the clock?
| Type of home | kWh a day, 10 hours | Per day, 10 hours | Per winter, 10 hours a day | Per winter, day and night |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passive house | 4.0 | €1.17 | €247 | €592 |
| New build | 9.0 | €2.61 | €548 | €1,315 |
| Renovated | 16.9 | €4.89 | €1,028 | €2,466 |
| Partly renovated | 27.0 | €7.83 | €1,644 | €3,946 |
| Older home, not renovated | 37.8 | €10.96 | €2,302 | €5,525 |
Here’s where it gets revealing. In a renovated home, our four rooms heated only when they’re used add up to around €460 a winter. Heat the whole house for ten hours a day and it’s around €1,030. Same house, same heaters, more than double the bill, and most of the difference is spent keeping empty rooms cosy for nobody.
In real life you’ll land somewhere in between, because heat is sociable and wanders off into the rooms you’ve left cold. But the lesson stands: the cheapest heat is the heat you don’t make for an empty room.
Do the sums for your own home
If you’re the sort of person who likes to check the working (and we hope you are), here it is in three steps:
- Heater size: room size in m² × watts per m² from the first table ÷ 1,000. That gives you kilowatts (kW).
- Electricity per day: (kW × 0.5) + (kW × your hours of heating minus half an hour × the share of time it’s on). That gives you kWh a day.
- Cost per winter: kWh a day × your price per kWh × the number of days you heat.
Take the bedroom in a renovated home. 12 × 75 ÷ 1,000 = 0.9 kW. Then (0.9 × 0.5) + (0.9 × 2.5 × 0.3) = 1.13 kWh a day. At €0.29, that’s 33 cents a day, or about €69 over 210 days.
Paying a different price for electricity? Take any cost in this article, multiply it by your price and divide by 0.29. Or skip the arithmetic altogether and let our running cost calculator do it for any floor area.
Why your costs may be different
We’ve said it a few times now, but it’s the single most important thing in this article, so let’s be specific about why:
- Your climate. A house on a windswept hill in a cold country is fighting a much harder battle than one in a sheltered valley somewhere mild.
- Your windows. Glass is, thermally speaking, a hole in the wall that you can see through. A room with a lot of it loses heat fast, even in a newer house.
- Draughts. Every gap around a door, a window or a floorboard is a small leak, and a lot of small leaks add up to one big one.
- How warm you like it. Each degree you turn the thermostat down saves around 6% of your heating energy. And here’s a nice quirk of infrared: because it warms you and the surfaces around you directly, most people feel just as comfortable with it set two or three degrees lower than with radiators.
- How long you heat. Halve the hours and you roughly halve the cost. Not exactly glamorous, but true.
Which is why, before you decide anything, we’d strongly recommend having a professional assess your home. They can work out what each room genuinely needs, so the heaters are the right size (too small and you’re cold, too big and you’ve paid for capacity you’ll never use) and you have a realistic idea of what will turn up on your bill. We’ll do this for free: send us your plans and we’ll come back with a layout and estimated running costs, room by room.
How to keep your costs down
- Insulate first. If you only take one thing from this article, take this one. Going from a partly renovated home to a renovated one cuts the cost of every room by about a third. No heater, however clever, can compete with simply losing less heat.
- Heat room by room. Give each room its own thermostat and timer, and let empty rooms stay cool. The numbers above make the case better than we can.
- Use your own solar power. If you have solar panels or a home battery, our low-voltage ComfortScrim system can run straight from them. In spring and autumn, a good part of your heating can run on electricity you never had to buy. More in infrared heating and solar.
And if you’re wondering how infrared stacks up against gas or a heat pump, that’s a different (and longer) story: is infrared heating cost effective?
Infrared heating running costs: your questions
How much does infrared heating cost per hour?
A heater costs its power times your electricity price for each hour it runs flat out: a 1,000 watt heater at €0.29 per kWh costs 29 cents an hour. Once the room is warm it is only on part of the time. As a rough guide, a 10 m² room in a renovated home costs about 11 cents for the first half hour and about 7 cents for each hour after that. Your own costs will depend on your home.
How much does it cost to heat a room with infrared?
As a rough guide, in a renovated home at €0.29 per kWh: a small bathroom heated for two hours costs about 10 cents a day, a bedroom heated for three hours about 33 cents, a home office heated for eight hours about 60 cents, and a living room heated for six hours about €1.17. These are estimates. A professional assessment will give you figures for your own rooms.
How much does infrared heating cost to run for a whole house?
For a 90 m² home heated ten hours a day over 210 days at €0.29 per kWh, roughly: €250 for a passive house, €550 for a new build, €1,030 for a renovated home, €1,640 for a partly renovated one and €2,300 for an older home that has not been renovated. Heating day and night costs about 2.4 times as much. Real costs vary from home to home.
How big does an infrared heater need to be for my room?
As a rough guide, between 30 and 120 watts per square metre, depending mostly on how well your home is insulated. A 12 m² bedroom in a renovated home needs roughly 900 watts. The right size for your room depends on your windows, walls, climate and how you use it, so have a professional work it out before you buy.
How can I make infrared heating cheaper to run?
Insulate first, because it cuts the heat every room needs. Then heat only the rooms you are using, when you are using them, and set the thermostat two or three degrees lower than you would with radiators, which saves roughly 12 to 18%. Solar panels or a home battery can cover part of what is left.
