Sometimes they are designed that way. Some people prefer a consistent look along the wall so the cover, and sometimes the pipe too, run the whole wall. If the room is near the beginning of the loop, or the heat demand is low, you can find few fins. Why is that room cold? It is probably not as bizarre as you think. Maybe someone miscalculated. Maybe some modifications were made to the house that made the other rooms relatively warmer. That might happen because a window was added to the cold room or maybe the insulation was degraded there or added elsewhere. I don't think that you can find fins to add. You might make some yourself, but you'd have to design them for good heat transfer (good contact) from the pipe. Is there any way to better insulate or air-seal the room? That will cost you less in the long run. Check the attic insulation above that room to see if there is some defect and think about adding some even if there is not a defect. Take a good look at the windows and see if there is room for improvement.

Okay, finally I have success! I'll detail what I did as it might save someone a lot of headache. First off, hot water pipes are thinner than cold water. I think cold water is type M and hot is type L or vice versa. No matter how many times I look that up, I still forget! Anyway, I got pretty good at cutting the thick one but was having MAJOR difficulty cutting the thin one. To make a long story short, I had to use a hand held key saw. Annoying, slow but that worked. Next, stick bread in the lines on both sides to block the water. You think you get all of the water out of the line, but you don't. With water in the line, soldering will be impossible. You'll have to heat the joints three times as long and the solders won't be good. I had leaks by not following this. A step which I knew but still didn't do. Stupid on my part. Okay, no more leaks. Now, I'm supposed to bleed the lines. Although my house was built in the 1930s, we added a large addition and the house is pretty new, including the heating system. It seems that the plumbers are no longer putting bleeders on the line. Mine don't have any. No problem. I should just open up point 1 in pic 2, and the valve on point 9, pic 1 (which you can't see) then open the garden house valve on line 1, pic 2. When the water flows out smoothly with no sputtering, the air is out, right? Well yes, but things just weren't working that way. I did everything I just said and water came out. Within 10 seconds, however, all the water came out and it just dried up! Uh, is that supposed to happen? Confused, I shut the line and waited about 30 minutes while I did other things. I came back and tried again. Same results!!! I had about enough of this plumbing project. Looks like it won and I lost. After about 10 successful projects, I was going to have to call in a plumber. I tried getting the job taken care of with my normal service contract, convinced that it was just a lack of knowledge on my part. I was told that since it was the weekend and they weren't sure the project fell under my normal service agreement, they might have to bill me...at the more expensive weekend rate...of $165 per hour!!! I quickly told the lady I'd figure it out myself. Searching this site, I found the answer. I did everything right except one thing. You have to continually add water to the line so that it keeps flushing the air out. You do that by flipping the little handle on point 5, pic 2. That automatically ensures that the pressure in the baseboards remains at the setting on the reducer by adding water when need be. However, if you open it manually, it will just let the water flow (also pushing the air out with it). If there's air in the line, the pipes aren't going to get hot, so you've gotta get the air out. With each bucket of water I let flow through, more of the line got hot. Three buckets of water later, the water was flowing smoothly and I had heat! Note that by me doing what I did, I introduced air into another zone, so I had to repeat the process for that zone as well. No biggie. Three more buckets later, that zone was working again! Now I don't know if there's a way to work on one zone while not affecting the others. I'll have to examine what I did a little and see if there's a sensible way of doing it. Anyway, hopefully this helps someone.

My furniture also hides the length of most of my drapes, but there are 2 places where they're visible and anything other than floor-length would have looked silly. I went ahead and hung them anyway and figured I could always hem (ok, safety pin...I rarely sew!) them up when the heat came on. We could stand having it look weird for a few months out of the year. It turned out to not really be a problem. They get warm, but not hot, and they cover just a tiny part of the baseboard heater. They are a very light burlap-ish fabric, though; I might not have tired it with something heavy and rich like velour.

There are lots of boiler/hydronic experts at the following fora. This is a great forum but there is a lot more activity in these areas and some sharp people posting: http://www.terrylove.com/forums/index.php and http://forum.heatinghelp.com If you do a web search for "monoflow T" you will find a much better explanation that I can field. The mechanical bypass t-stats that I am familiar with would be right on the radiators themselves and you'd need to have a bypass pipe with them as well. Electrical valves could be elsewhere. All of this kind of stuff puts you outside of the "simple loop" concept. have you been able to view and evaluate the whole of the pipes that run your system to be sure what you have?