The new test rig is designed to fatigue test radiators at a greatly accelerated rate over our existing test rigs, replicating a 25 year life cycle for an Eskimo radiator in approximately 2 months.

The new rig will allow our design engineers to vary temperatures from 0 to 95ºC and working pressures from 1 to 15 bar, the latter being particularly important for our growing markets.

The key benefit to our customers will be that the rig will allow us to design and test new prototypes much more quickly allowing us to refine their performance and often reduce the cost of manufacture, savings that will then be fed through to the price of Eskimo products. It will also allow us to bring new products to market in a fraction of the time that it currently takes.

The test rig is being developed and manufactured for Eskimo by Formrite Precision Ltd, www.formrite.co.uk/test.htm Most commonly
associated with the aerospace industry Formrite were recently awarded a ten year contract to design and build a wide variety of test bed equipment for Rolls Royce.

New test rig, Eskimo Products Ltd, November 2011

What is less well known is that the Outline range also features extremely low water volume – an average Outline radiator uses only 1/3 of the water of a standard steel panel radiator and only 10% of the water required by cast iron radiators.

“Why do I care about water volume?” you’d be entitled to say, as after all most people use a closed system that only needs filling up very rarely, so it’s worth looking at the physics:

It takes 4.18kW to raise the temperature of 1 litre of water by 1ºC in 1 second and an average steel panel radiator has a water volume of at least 5 litres. If you have 10 radiators in your system that’s 50 litres of water that you need to heat to 70ºC before that radiator starts delivering its rated performance. It also means about 17.5kW of power used if you raise that 50 litres of water to temperature in 10 minutes.

BUT if your radiators only use 1/3^rd of the water, then you use 1/3^rd of the power to get the radiators to temperature, meaning the radiators start working much more quickly, meaning you don’t need to program your heating to come on ½ an hour before you get home, you program it to come on 10 minutes before you get home – added up over the course of a year for an average home that would mean a saving of something like 1606 kw/hours or £190 at current energy prices and a significant reduction in your carbon footprint.

The other problem with a system having a high water volume is that it takes a long time to cool down. We’re all familiar with the vagaries of the British Climate, rain one minute, sun the next. That means your heating system has to cope with huge variations over the course of a day. If your heating system takes 40 minutes to cool down when the spring sun comes out your only way of preventing things getting uncomfortably hot is to open the window, at which point all that heat you’ve paid for and which has used up precious natural resources disappears into the atmosphere.

Other applications include properties where high skirting boards would normally require the radiator to mounted at an unsightly height on the wall, or under benches and in alcoves where a wall mounted radiator would otherwise suffer from
a reduced heat output from being mounted too far back.

Essentially Leggy Ron is a great solution for otherwise unusable spaces, allowing wall space
to be freed up for hanging artwork for instance, and allowing radiators to be used where the only option would otherwise be underfloor heating with all the associated issues such as lack of temperature control.

Eskimo’s Ron range crosses the boundary between contemporary and classic. Its styling
cues include 1950s aircraft technology and the traditional schoolhouse radiator. As a result it will happily sit with most interior schemes from ultra-modern to period.

Leggy Ron, in RAL 7016 Anthracite Grey.

Ron is a modular aluminium high output radiator: allowing you to add as many sections as you need from 1 to 50 (52mm to 2600mm).

Available in a range of six standard heights.
Fit long, low 200mm high versions underneath windows or shelving; or fit space saving 1.8 m tall and narrow versions.

Three metal finshes plus a range of standard RAL colours – special colours and a colour matching service, available on request.

One of the many reasons to source bespoke radiators is that this allows the specifier to dramatically reduce installation costs by having a radiator manufactured that will precisely match existing pipe centres. This then means that the old radiator can simply be removed and the new one fitted in it’s place without any alteration to the pipework. This is particularly valuable if the radiator pipweork is coming through a floor covering that needs to be kept in good condition, such as old floorboards etc.