Warm Bathrooms Without the Blinding Lights
When you’re designing an infrared heater for a bathroom, you’re basically playing a balancing act. You want it to get warm—fast—but you don’t want it to feel like you’re standing under a stadium floodlight. This is especially important if there are babies around; their eyes are way more sensitive than ours, and a harsh glare just isn’t okay. Dealing with the glare Most standard short-wave lamps are just… bright. Too bright. To fix that, we use coated quartz glass or specific filters. Think of it as a shield. It blocks those aggressive spikes of visible light but lets the actual heat pass through to your skin. You get all the warmth, but the light stays soft and mellow. No one wants to be blinded while they’re trying to dry off. The struggle with water and heat Since these go in bathrooms, they need an IP44 rating. In plain English? They can handle splashes from any direction without shorting out. But here’s the tricky part: when you seal a unit tight to keep water out, you’re also trapping the heat inside. If the housing isn’t built to handle the lamp’s wattage, you’ll literally cook the internal electronics. We spend a lot of time figuring out how to keep the water out while letting the driver breathe so it doesn’t burn out halfway through the winter. A few tips for getting it right If you’re swapping out old halogen bulbs for these, double-check your voltage and wattage. Don’t just guess. If you put a lamp that’s too powerful into a small fixture, you might actually warp the reflector. One thing to keep in mind: because we’ve dampened the spectrum to save your eyes, these take a tiny bit longer to warm up than the raw, blinding tubes. It’s a small price to pay for safety. Just make sure you’re using a moisture-resistant switch and mount the fixture at an angle. You want the heat to hit you, but you don’t want the beam staring you right in the face.