News wrote:
The British Advertising Standards Authority... [objected to] a brochure
for roof insulation. The brochure stated "TRI-ISO SUPER 9 Insulation for
roofs was... Thermally equivalent to 200 mm of mineral wool when installed
in a roof situation, as certified by the European certifying body, BM TRADA
CERTIFICATION (following real building trials...
... Actis said they had commissioned BM TRADA Certification Ltd (BM TRADA)
to test, assess and report on the TRI-ISO Super 9 product. They provided us
with a copy of the BM TRADA Certification and Report dated August 1997 and
said that it substantiated their claims... They pointed out that BM TRADA
had used "in situ" testing involving a real external environment with
variations in temperature, humidity, etc. rather than the traditional
methods of laboratory testing...
... We understood that BM TRADA had tested TRI-ISO SUPER 9 and the mineral
wool in two separate roof installations. However, we noted that BM TRADA
had not used the standard industry methods of testing and that the report
provided by Actis did not include sufficient detail to support their own
methods of testing.
We acknowledged that BM TRADA Certification was a leading multi-sector
certification body accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service.
We considered that the BM TRADA report did not provide enough detail to
support their methodology...
.... ie they faulted the test documentation, vs the result.
We understood that RT was a symbol of total thermal resistance and typically
had the standard unit of measurement of mēK/W. We noted that the claim
"RT=5" was not qualified by any recognised units of measurement e.g. mēK/W
and a small footnote stated only "in situ measured values" without further
explanation. Because the value of 5 was not qualified by any recognised
units of measurement, we considered the claim "RT=5" was ambiguous and
should be qualified in future.
.... and they faulted the lack of explicit units in the advertised result.
However, we noted that the BM TRADA report did specify an overall resistance
(RT) of 5.0mēK/W derived from the in situ testing...
Picky, picky. Reflectix does advertise some system R-values:
http://www.reflectixinc.com/script/p...duct.asp?ID=64
http://www.reflectixinc.com/script/p...duct.asp?ID=77
http://www.majorgeothermal.com/PDFs/.../Solutions.pdf
The US R16.8 crawl space number is interesting.
Nick