My house is a mid-Victorian terrace in Leeds. It has solid brick walls, high ceilings, single-glazed sash windows in the back bedroom, and a heating bill that has been making me wince since I moved in four years ago. I've done what I can — draught-proofed the windows, added a rug to the bare floorboards, put a shelf above the radiator to push heat into the room rather than straight up to the ceiling. All of it helped, marginally.
But the back bedroom remained the problem room. Cold in the morning, slow to heat up, and always slightly cooler than the rest of the house even when the radiator had been on for hours. I'd had the radiator bled twice. The boiler had been serviced. The radiator itself was hot to the touch. The heat was just... disappearing somewhere.
It took an embarrassingly long time for me to work out where.
The Problem I'd Been Ignoring
Victorian terraces have solid external walls — no cavity, no insulation, just brick. The back bedroom radiator sits against an external wall. Every time that radiator fired up, a significant portion of the heat it was producing was being conducted straight into the wall and out into the yard rather than radiating into the room.
I'd read about radiator reflector panels before but always dismissed them as one of those marginal gains that sounds good in theory and makes no practical difference. Then I had a particularly grim January, a particularly large gas bill, and a particularly cold morning where I could see my breath in the back bedroom at 8am despite the heating having been on for an hour.
I decided to actually try it.
Why I Chose SuperFOIL
There are a few radiator reflector products on the market. Some are thin, single-layer foil that looks like it belongs in a packed lunch. Others are thicker, multi-layer insulation panels. I wanted something with actual substance — a product that was doing real insulation work, not just reflecting a token amount of heat.
The SuperFOIL Radiator Insulation Reflective Foil stood out for a few reasons. SuperFOIL is a brand with a serious reputation in the insulation industry — their products are used in professional building projects, not just DIY bodge jobs. The 0.6m x 5m roll gave me more than enough material to cover the full height and width of the radiator with some to spare. And crucially, the adhesive pads were included — no separate trip to the hardware shop, no guessing about what adhesive would work on plaster without pulling the paint off.
The reflective foil construction is the key feature. Rather than just slowing heat loss into the wall (which a foam panel does), the reflective surface actively bounces radiant heat back into the room. In a solid-wall property where you're fighting physics, that distinction matters.
I found it in the Heating Radiator Reflectors and Heating Radiator Accessories collections, which is exactly where I'd been browsing. It also appears in the broader Household Appliance Accessories and Home & Garden ranges if you're doing a wider energy efficiency sweep.
I ordered it on a Sunday afternoon. It arrived Tuesday.
Fitting It — Easier Than I Expected
I'll be honest: I was slightly nervous about this. The radiator in the back bedroom is a standard double-panel convector, wall-mounted on brackets, with about 3cm of clearance between the back of the radiator and the wall. Not a lot of room to work in.
The process turned out to be straightforward. I measured the height and width of the radiator, cut the SuperFOIL to size with a pair of scissors (it cuts cleanly, no specialist tools needed), and used the included adhesive pads to fix it to the wall behind the radiator. The pads are strong enough to hold the foil securely but gentle enough that they didn't damage the plaster when I repositioned one panel slightly.
Total time from opening the package to having the foil in place: about 25 minutes. Most of that was measuring twice and cutting once, as instructed by every DIY guide ever written.
The foil sits flush against the wall, invisible behind the radiator. You'd never know it was there.
The Results — One Full Winter On
I fitted the SuperFOIL in early February, which gave me about six weeks of cold weather to test it properly before spring arrived. Here's what I noticed:
- The back bedroom heats up faster. Noticeably faster. Where it used to take 45 minutes to an hour to feel genuinely warm, it now reaches a comfortable temperature in 25 to 30 minutes. That's not a marginal improvement — it's a meaningful one.
- The room stays warmer for longer. After the heating cycles off, the back bedroom used to cool down quickly. Now it holds its temperature better. The heat that's being reflected into the room rather than absorbed by the wall is staying in the room.
- The radiator runs for shorter periods. The thermostat in that room reaches its target temperature sooner, so the boiler isn't running as long to maintain it. Whether that translates to a measurable reduction in my gas bill is harder to isolate — there are too many variables — but the logic is sound and the anecdotal evidence is encouraging.
- No visible difference to the room. The foil is completely hidden behind the radiator. No aesthetic compromise whatsoever.
The Difference It's Made
The back bedroom is no longer the problem room. That's the simplest way I can put it. A room that was chronically cold, that I'd spent four years accepting as just a feature of living in a Victorian terrace, is now consistently comfortable. I work from home two days a week and I've started using that room as my office, which I'd avoided before because it was too cold to sit in for hours at a stretch.
The SuperFOIL cost a fraction of what secondary glazing would have cost, a fraction of what external wall insulation would cost, and it took 25 minutes to fit. For solid-wall properties where the expensive solutions are genuinely expensive, a product like this sits in a useful gap: real insulation performance, DIY installation, minimal outlay.
If you have a radiator on an external wall — especially in an older property with solid walls — I'd genuinely recommend trying the SuperFOIL Radiator Insulation Reflective Foil. Browse the full Heating Radiator Reflectors collection and the Heating Radiator Accessories range for everything in this category.
It's the kind of fix that makes you slightly annoyed you didn't do it sooner.
Brendan Okafor is a project manager and amateur home improver based in Leeds. He has been slowly making his Victorian terrace less draughty since 2020, with mixed results and occasional success.
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