radiant barrier behind radiators
 

I personally don't have radiators in my house, but my uncle does. I was watching the video in the link below today and wondered if anyone has tried this in their own house? Does it work well?

Warm Up and Save on Home Insulation -- Savings Experiment - DailyFinance

I've been using them for umpteen years, first in my Grandma's house, then that was the first thing I did when I moved after getting married. The ones I have are styrofoam (~5mm) with alu foil on one side. Available at any construction store.

Do they work? I've never quantified it, not even sure how I'd go about objectively testing, but the wall is definately colder behind barrier when I slide my hand in there. Maybe I'll test it tomorrow with my IR thermometer.

EDIT: I just checked: The room temperature is 17.5°C, the boiler just turned off and the radiator registered 40.6°C. The wall about a meter from the radiator registered 16.6°C. I tried to get the IR behind the barrier, but I'm afraid that there is too much heat from radiator effecting the reading, the lowest I got was 19.5°C, but I can feel with my fingers that the wall behind the barrier is colder than the spot a meter away.

I can vouch for using tin foil as a way to radiat heat away from the wall and into the room.
I have a woodstove and made a wall behind the stove with cement board covered with tin foil. WOW! It works great. Even when the stove is topping 400 F the tinfoil is cool to the touch and the wall behind it is also cool.
Here is the link to the thread where I posted the pics........http://ecorenovator.org/forum/applia....html#post9662

Our local gas utility gives them away. We have noticed a definite improvement and I put them wherever I can fit them in. The ones they give away are corrugated and can glue to the wall. I'm adding 3 more rads in the house to lower my entering water temp in prep to go from boiler to HP so all savings is good savings.

They really are good for many projects!
I used the foil-on-styrofoam barrier to insulate the back of our fridge from the warm coils.
In the summer, I put a piece between the window and bug screen on one of our southwest facing windows to keep some sun out. It makes the inside of the window 2-3°C cooler on a very hot day.

Sorry for getting OT. Back to radiators:D