Lunar, I had radiators in the previous house I lived in (my Grandma's). While renovating, one of the things I did was to put a thermal barrier behind the radiator. It is a piece of styrofoam a few mm thick with aluminum foil on one side. They come in 10m rolls. The 50cm width is about the same as the height of a radiator, just cut the right length. You glue it to the wall behind the rad, with the foil facing the room. I didn't take the rads off for this, so it took some exercise to slip it in. I don't know how your house is built, but at my Grandma's the walls were 50cm thick, but only 40cm under the windows where the radiators were hanging. This means that a lot of heat was being wasted.
Here at my wife's house we have a cabinet in front of the kitchen radiator. I made holes under and above it and the air circulates pretty fast when the rad is hot. But the cabinet gets quite warm inside, which means that a lot of heat is being tranfered through the back. If you put something in front of your radiators, then it is also going to absorb heat, even if there is lots of airflow behind it. That's why I'd vote against covering the rads up, unless it would be something very thin, maybe some kind of screen.
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Originally Posted by lunarhighway
boxing in the thermostatic valve might cause it to kick out to soon, and perhaps i'll trap the heat inside.
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I've seen radiator valves with the thermostat on some kind of cable, about 1-2m long. This would let you keep the sensor out in the room and not too close to the rad. Or, if you do go along with encasing, keep the valve itself outside of it. A thermostat inside the box will be useless.