Verdict
Beldray’s Smart Ceramic Radiator may look unremarkable, but it’s an extremely effective heater. It’s also full of useful features, including a facility to limit its maximum core temperature – ideal if you’re using it in a kid’s room. It’s a shame, then, that it’s let down by slightly confusing controls and an inaccurate thermostat.
Pros
- Smart controls
- Great features
- Wheeled feet help offset its weight
Cons
- Inaccurate thermostat
- App and controls can be confusing
- Could be expensive to run
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A powerful convector heaterThis 2,000-watt convector heater has enough power to warm up even a fairly large room. Its heavy ceramic core also helps deliver a steady heat output. -
Smart controlsUse the onboard control panel to configure various features, or the app to control it from anywhere.
Introduction
Beldray’s Smart Ceramic Radiator is a 2000W convector heater with a heavy ceramic core. Much like an oil-filled radiator, this takes a long time to warm up and cool down again, helping smooth out the on/off heat output you normally get from electric heaters. The core also stores a huge amount of heat, so this radiator keeps raising the temperature for some time after you’ve switched it off.
This heater also comes packed full of useful features. It heats to one of three configurable temperatures, depending on which mode it’s in, and can detect when you’ve opened a window or even when there’s no one in the room. You can also limit its maximum core temperature – potentially very useful around children, pets and anyone with infirmities.
Design and features
- Inoffensive design
- Confusing controls and app
- Excellent features
The core of the Beldray Smart Ceramic Radiator is surrounded by seven metal heating sections, each of which has a double-finned, double-sided design. This gives the heater a substantial amount of surface area to go with its moderately high power rating, so it should be quite effective. Its display and connections are gathered into a non-heating eighth section to the right, which looks fairly neat.
Apart from a rear-mounted power switch, this heater’s only control is a backlit LCD touch-panel on top of the right-hand section. It’s possible to operate all of its features from this, but at first, I found it baffling. Even when you do know what you’re doing, the screen is quick to go dark if you leave it, and slow to wake up again when you’re trying to use it. Upward-facing screens always make me nervous as it’s easy to drop something and smash them, but you can operate every feature via the Smart Life app, which is a bit easier to fathom.
It took me a bit of fussing around to get this radiator connected to Wi-Fi, but smart control worked reliably once I had. This radiator has configurable Frost, Eco and Comfort temperatures, and you can run it permanently in any of those three modes. Alternatively, you can set a schedule to change between Eco and Comfort, although strangely you can’t schedule it to enter Frost mode, or turn off.
There’s a further ‘Induce’ mode, in which the radiator detects whether anyone’s present in the room. If no-one’s detected for a while it’ll knock 1°C off the target temperature, and knock a further degree off once more time has elapsed. If the room stays empty, the radiator switches to its Eco temperature, before finally reverting to Frost mode after 24 hours. You can configure the time period for which the radiator waits at each stage, in 15-minute increments up to one hour.
It sounds confusing, but it’s a smart system. Say you’d set the Comfort temperature to 20°C, Eco to 16°C, and the Induce time period to 30 minutes, then you went out to dinner at 6pm on a Friday. At 6:30pm the Beldray Smart Ceramic Radiator would turn down to 19°C, then at 7pmpm it would drop to 18°C. At 19:30pm it would enter Eco mode (16°C). If your dinner turned into an impromptu weekend away, the radiator would switch to frost mode at 6pm on Saturday – that’s if you didn’t remember to switch it off remotely using the app.
This radiator detects an open window, shutting off the heat if the room temperature drops by 2°C within a couple of minutes. You can also optionally limit its maximum operating temperature in five-degree increments from 30-50°C. This feature prevents the core and metal fins from getting to very hot temperatures. Although that would make it less effective when you need maximum heat, it’s an excellent idea if you need to protect young kids or other vulnerable householders from burns.
Performance
- Excellent heating performance
- Inaccurate thermostat
- Could be expensive to run
When actively heating, the Beldray Smart Ceramic Radiator consumed 2144W – a little way above its 2kW rating. Sat next to it, I didn’t notice much warmth over the first 10 minutes or so, during which the ceramic core absorbs much of the heating elements’ output. That soon changed, however. After 30 minutes it had raised the air temperature of my medium-sized room from 18.3°C to 20.0°C, consuming 1.08 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity in the process.
Over the following 30 minutes, the electric element began to cycle on and off, reducing the rate at which the radiator used electricity. After an hour of use, the room temperature had reached 21.6°C, at the cost of 1.69kWh of power.
This heater continues releasing heat even after it’s switched off. Fifteen minutes after the end of my test, the temperature in my room peaked at 22.0°C. Forty-five minutes later, the radiator was still slightly warm, and the room had only dropped to 21.1°C, despite sub-zero temperatures outside.
Unfortunately, this impressive heating performance was undermined somewhat by an unreliable thermostat. I cranked the heater to 30°C for the above test so that it wouldn’t shut off, but at a more realistic target temperature of 18°C it kept heating even when my other thermometers indicated the room was much warmer than the target. While the onboard thermostat never got above 16.5°C, the room temperature again reached 22°C after an hour.
Fortunately, there’s a temperature compensation feature in the app, which you can use to correct the reading by up to five degrees. A bit of tweaking helped to improve the heater’s accuracy.
It took time before I got this heater set up to deliver a steady, comfortable room temperature, but once I did it performed brilliantly. Although I was sitting only a metre away, I never overheated or felt cold. Whenever I checked on the radiator it was producing gentle heat, keeping the room very close to the target. Over three hours that included the initial heating phase, it consumed 2.8kWh – less than one kilowatt hour per hour, despite its 2kW rating.
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Should you buy it?
A very effective heater
Once it gets going, this radiator puts out a prodigious amount of heat, but it moderates this well once it’s up to temperature, preventing overheating. Use its occupant and open-window detection and it’ll automatically turn itself down, too.
Could be expensive to run
This isn’t a cheap heater, and with 2kW maximum power consumption it could prove expensive to run in large or badly insulated rooms.
Final Thoughts
The Beldray Smart Ceramic Radiator doesn’t look special, and its fiddly controls and app could prove frustrating – especially to non tech-savvy users. It’s also a shame that – on my sample at least – its thermostat wasn’t more accurate. Plug it in, set a sensible temperature and there’s a chance it’ll overshoot it completely – I ended up wearing only a t-shirt for two hours on the coldest day of the year.
Tweak the target temperatures and use the compensation feature to correct the onboard thermostat, however, and it’s a different creature. When necessary, it’ll pump out prodigious heat, but it can modulate it brilliantly, creating a cosy room without the hot and cold extremes you get with many other convectors – or even central heating systems. Like other electric heaters, it could prove expensive to run in large or draughty rooms, but once it gets a well-insulated room up to temperature its consumption is far more reasonable. This could make it a good choice for a room that’s not served by central heating, especially if it’s well insulated and draft-proofed. If you want something faster, then check out our guide to the best electric heaters.
How we test
Unlike other sites, we test every heater we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main heater for the review period
We measure the fan speed (if available) using an anemometer so that we can accurately compare performance between models
We measure the heat output of the fan and its effect on our test lab.
FAQs
Yes. Their ceramic core acts as a heat store, so they continue releasing heat for some time after being switched off. This can help smooth out the on/off behaviour found with other convection heaters.
In the UK, electricity tends to be more expensive than gas, even at off-peak rates. As such, a gas central heating system is currently cheaper to run. If you don’t have central heating, a ceramic radiator can store a little heat from off peak periods and release it later, but you’ll need a proper storage heater to make the most of this.
