🚀 go-pugleaf

Brad Lindsay  <ab8r@getnet.com> wrote:
>Nick Pine wrote:
>> Albrecht Kadlec  <albrecht@java.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>> >nick@vu-vlsi.ee.vill.edu (Nick Pine) writes:

>> >I always care about radiation losses last:
>> >conduction and convection losses come first.
 
>>Nick, I just stumbled across your thoughts on heat movement through walls... 

Good...

>"radiation is my last concern"...????

That was Albrecht's thought, not mine. It looks like the >> >'s above
somehow got out of sync.

>Maybe in your part of the country. 

Definitely. We are more concerned about heating than cooling here, and
for that, R-values work pretty well up to some temperature like 200 F.

>Here in Phoenix, we have been building test houses since 1986. What we 
>have found is radiation the primary source of heat movement.  This was 
>proven in our last house using no insulation, only a reflective film 
>(radiant barrier) in the walls.  The 2400 sq ft home consumed $56.00 in 
>electricity in the month of August!

Sounds nice, but why so much? How about ventilating your adobe house
at night or building a tower with a few 55 gallon drums full of water
behind your frame house, with some south glazing on top? In the summer,
allow the sun to heat up the top drums during the day and vent the whole
tower at night with cooler night air, using the top as a solar chimney
with stored heat from the day. Allow this cool night air to circulate
into the house as well. Close the outer vents during the day. Putting a
wet mesh over the lower vent would further lower the night temp on an
average August day, swamp-cooler-style. And pumping some water up from
a shallow pond in the ceiling above the cool drums to a shallow pond
on the roof would allow additional radiative cooling on clear still nights
when the roof pond could be up to 20 F cooler than the air temp, owing to
night-sky radiation. You might use one window AC for dehumidification.

And solar heat all the water drums in the winter. 

>A comparable home would use $300+ with standard insulation products which
>focus on limiting conductive and convective heat movement. 

Sounds better and cheaper :-)

Nick

Nicholson L. Pine                      System design and consulting
Pine Associates, Ltd.                                (610) 489-0545 
821 Collegeville Road                           Fax: (610) 489-7057
Collegeville, PA 19426                     Email: nick@ece.vill.edu

Microprocessor hardware, memory, ASIC, and computer design. Telecommunication
system design. Computer simulation and modeling. High performance, low cost,
residential solar heating and cogeneration system design. BSEE, MSEE. Senior
Member, IEEE. Registered US Patent Agent. Fluent in French.