Andrew Gabriel wrote:
In article ,
(Fergus McMenemie) writes:
Hello,
How common is silver foil backed plaster board? Almost every
wall and ceiling of my house seems to use it and it generally
causes havoc with any of the wireless systems that are all
over the house. WLAN (especially 802.11a/b, g seems better),
DECT phones and now the Central Heating.
We recently had our central heating system modernised and as
part of doing so we have the house zoned with Siemens RDJ10RF
wireless thermostatic controllers for each zone. They are
proving to be unreliable. Speaking to Siemens they seem to
imply that foil backed plaster board was unheard of, and that
I cant expect their system to work in such a house.
But then again kingspan insulation etc is also foil backed and
I guess that is increasingly common?
Foil backed plasterboard's use has changed over the years.
Originally, the foil was used as an insulation layer, having a
lower emmissivity than the bare board face. Its insulation
properties no longer come close to anything required nowadays,
and it's now used as a vapour barrier (and has turned into a
sheet of aluminised plastic).
However, in either case, use on internal walls would be unusual
and not normally meritted. It may be that your builder had a job
lot of it for some reason, and needed to use it up. I use it
where I need a vapour barrier, and sometimes the off-cuts will
be used where foil backed board isn't required, but that would
be just partial sheets.
TBH, I personally would tend to avoid wireless for things like
heating controls. If you do use them (particularly for things
like frost protection when you're away on holiday), make sure
you fit new batteries before you go. The old ones may well stop
working as the temperature falls, just when you need them most.
--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
The "house" is a colletion of very old farm buildings that
were converted into a house. Almost all of the internal walls
are original with no damp course etc. So I guess vapour barriers
were an important part of every wall.
Insualation is generally poor. The original walls seem to have
had some kind of tough paper laid against them, followed by upto
2 inches of rock wool or fibre glass then a sheet of plastic
and the foil backed plaster board.