How to paint a heating radiator

It is always nice to see how an old thing is updat­ed, acquires a new look and attrac­tive appear­ance. Paint­ing a heat­ing radi­a­tor is a good idea if you are not going to change it, but you need to dec­o­rate it.

Even mod­ern bimetal­lic radi­a­tors, which are paint­ed in pro­duc­tion, rarely fit well into the inte­ri­or. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, they are white, easy to care for, but bor­ing. There­fore, often the own­ers decide to close them with a screen. But you can go the oth­er way and paint the radi­a­tor in a bright col­or. This will not affect its prop­er­ties to heat the room. At the same time, as the design­ers assure, a dark or bright radi­a­tor visu­al­ly seems warmer and gives the room a spe­cial cozi­ness.

You can paint old cast iron, alu­minum, steel radi­a­tors. The paint must be exact­ly for the met­al and heat-resis­tant. Alkyd enam­els have proven them­selves well, but you can take oil-based and even water-based paint if it is indi­cat­ed on the can that it is heat-resis­tant, can resist cor­ro­sion and is also intend­ed for use on met­al sur­faces.

It is best to paint the radi­a­tor, of course, dur­ing the warm sea­son, when the heat­ing in the apart­ment or house is turned off. Vide­ale, of course, it is bet­ter to remove it from the wall and take it out­side to paint it from all sides with­out fear of spoil­ing oth­er fin­ish­es. But in gen­er­al, if it is pos­si­ble to close the valve and stop the sup­ply of coolant to the heat­ing bat­tery, this can be done indoors, with­out remov­ing it, and dur­ing the heat­ing sea­son.

The process looks like this:

• Use mask­ing tape to pro­tect the bleed valve and oth­er parts of the radi­a­tor that should not be paint­ed over. If you paint with­out remov­ing the bat­tery, then you need to pro­tect near­by sec­tions of the wall with tape so as not to spoil, for exam­ple, wall­pa­per.
• Clean the radi­a­tor. Rough clean­ing of old paint is done using a met­al brush, more accu­rate — with sand­pa­per of dif­fer­ent grain sizes.
• Then it is advis­able to wash the radi­a­tor with a damp cloth to remove sand­ing dust. Let it dry com­plete­ly.
• The entire sur­face is nec­es­sar­i­ly primed so that the paint does not peel off lat­er. A spe­cial primer for met­al is used, there are aerosol for­mu­la­tions that are eas­i­er to apply.
• Paint­ing is car­ried out direct­ly. As the por­tal Rmnt.ru already wrote, it is con­ve­nient to use a radi­a­tor brush with a long han­dle and a work­ing part locat­ed slight­ly at an angle. With a reg­u­lar brush, you can paint sur­faces that are easy to reach.

After fin­ish­ing work, the mask­ing tape is removed. Allow the radi­a­tor to dry com­plete­ly before turn­ing it on.

Can a spray gun be used? Of course, if you have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to either remove the radi­a­tor and take it out­side, or secure­ly pro­tect the wall around and behind the heat­ing device. With an air­brush, the process will be faster, and the paint will fall wher­ev­er need­ed, in an even lay­er. By the way, in the case of paint­ing smooth steel, there is a risk that the paint will drain. Allow the first to dry before apply­ing the sec­ond lay­er.

The process of paint­ing a heat­ing radi­a­tor is sim­ple, any home­own­er can han­dle it. The appear­ance of the bat­tery will be much more attrac­tive, it will last a few more years with­out los­ing its prop­er­ties.