Quote:
Originally Posted by jeff5may
Not everyone wants to invest the time, labor, and money to do the best job possible. There is usually a point where the return on investment diminishes beyond design goals or a target is hit (or missed). A "Take no prisoners" approach, such as the passive house standards employ, is a noble cause (which I and many others here subscribe to) that many of intermediate skill level doubt they can accomplish.
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OK, this is swell.
But the Internet is awash with forums, and blogs, and commercial builders' conventional advice. They tell you exactly how to do a conventional job.
Shouldn't we be taking the "Eco" part of EcoRenovator more seriously? I mean, have you been paying attention to what Daox is up to? He is doing a full-on, no compromise effort on an office remodel... that should be a hint to us.
We're in a minority here. I think we should be a minority of excellence, clarity and DIY creativity rather than a minority of conventional thinking.
We should ask more of ourselves. We should expect that our readers will ask more of themselves, too.
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BTW, I did a tiny experiment just now, to see what "not much" might look like...
I happened to have a 1/2" sheet of polyisocyanurate foam leaning up against the wall in the room I am in the process of insulating and remodeling, and I also happened to have an IR thermometer in my pocket.
I held my arm out to the side and took a reading of the polyiso with the IR thermometer. Here's what it read:
...this was within a degree of the ambient temperature, measured with a very reliable thermometer.
Then, I stood square on to the foil-covered polyiso, and measured again and this was the reading I got:
Why was the reading higher when I stood directly in front of the polyiso and read it square on?
To get my answer, I turned the IR at myself and took another reading:
So what this tells me is that yes, radiant energy exists, and that it reflects not so differently from light, and finally that even at lower temperatures such as the radiated heat from my suited-up body in a cold room, it is radiating enough to make a difference.
Heat radiates down from a radiant floor, too.
It is true that 6.7 degrees F is not a huge number, but having thermal reflectivity working for you over the life of a house is certainly worth considering, especially when a radiant floor during the heating season would be such a large area and would be the hottest surface that a cold, heat-sucking winter night would see.
-AC