"Larry" wrote in message
...
In article ,
JET_FEATHER wrote:

Hot air does NOT rise. Cool air FALLS displacing warmer air forcing it
upwards. PHYSICS.




--
JET_FEATHER

So on the moon, for instance, if some hot air was released from a storage
vessel, it would just stay put, since there is no cold air to displace it.
Is that right? PHYSICS.

That sounds about right. It would spread out obviously, And eventually,
other forces than gravity would move it further and eventually
disperse it into space. I'll guarantee a hot air balloon, or even
a helium balloon, won't rise on the moon.

Bob

On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:43:16 GMT, "Edwin Pawlowski"
wrote:


On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 09:07:59 -0500, "The Streets"

There is no cold -- only the absence of heat.

You never met my mother-in-law then.


Someone once told me that light doesn't exist either. It's an illusion
caused by the lack of darkness. He also claimed to have invented a new
electronic component: the DED (Darkness Emitting Diode).

In that case, what if sound is only the absence of silence? How about
a device that emits silence? Would it work on someone snoring loudly?
:-)
--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.laughingsquid.com

"Unlike biological evolution. 'intelligent design' is
not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has
no place in the curriculum of our nation's public
school classes." -- Ted Kennedy

Mark Lloyd wrote:

Someone once told me that light doesn't exist either. It's an illusion
caused by the lack of darkness. He also claimed to have invented a new
electronic component: the DED (Darkness Emitting Diode).

My brother-in-law came up with the idea of a reverse microwave. Put
something in it and turn it on and it sucks heat out of the object
really quick.

Chris

In article ,
lid says...
On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:43:16 GMT, "Edwin Pawlowski"
wrote:


On Fri, 9 Feb 2007 09:07:59 -0500, "The Streets"

There is no cold -- only the absence of heat.

You never met my mother-in-law then.


Someone once told me that light doesn't exist either. It's an illusion
caused by the lack of darkness. He also claimed to have invented a new
electronic component: the DED (Darkness Emitting Diode).

Darkness Emitting Axial Diode.

In that case, what if sound is only the absence of silence? How about
a device that emits silence? Would it work on someone snoring loudly?

How about:
http://www.bose.com/controller?
event=VIEW_PRODUCT_PAGE_EVENT&product=qc3_headphon es_index
:-)

Indeed. ;-)

--
Keith

"Don Klipstein" wrote in message
...
In article . com

The surface reflects infrared.

Okay. So far, so good.

Heat is the result of the infrared
energy being converted to heat energy when it is absorbed.

And because infra-red and ultra-violet are on the spectrum either side
of visible light, infra-red radiation ('rays' or 'waves' --whichever
or both) as you note, will be prevented by a reflective surface from
being absorbed into that surface. Infra-red is light, just as ultra-
violet is light and both are forms of electromagnetic radiation. And
now a question yet to be contested must arise: can a wood-fire and a
cast-iron stove generate infra-red radiation?

Of course, fire and highly heated cast-iron do most decidedly generate
infra-red radiation, which fact is empirically demonstrated by the
coolness of the foil on the wall directly behind the stove. The hot
fireplace screen back there demonstrates the same thing, that it is
infra-red radiation (and hardly much conduction of heated air) which
generates heat in the screen: if heated air was chiefly responsible
for the hot screen (purely mechanical heat conduction) then the foil
would be altogether so heated as the black iron.

Clearly, the main thing being generated by the stove is not heated
air, but infra-red radiation. Therefore an installation of highly
reflective foil in a home for the redirection (and capture) of
infrared radiation is essential for better insulation--see a Thermos
bottle.

Electromagnetic radiation is not the same thing as heat. Invisible
electromagnetic radiation is not heat any more than visible
electromagnetic radiation is.

When I say they are "the same" this means that in no instance will you
find heat without infrared radiation, either as the cause or the
result (or both). In all cases, some waveform of electromagnetic
radiation is at the cause of heat, if not infra-red, then visible
light directed through a lens, or ultra-violet rays burning the skin
of a sunbather. If infra-red, then it is generated by no more than the
activity of rubbing two sticks together.

Furthermore, no sooner does infra-red radiation become absorbed into
any form of matter, whether gas, liquid or solid--no sooner does that
mass begin to vibrate, then it too begins to generate infra-red
energy. For this reason, all "heat" is heat only insofar as it
generates infra-red vibration, which vibration is defined as "heat".

I would have no argument with this . . .

Thermal radiation is a process where heat energy is converted to
electromagnetic radiation, sometimes some of which is visible light.

- Don Klipstein )
--
Mackie
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/
"Who Did the Dahlia?"
http://whosenose.blogspot.com

"Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public Records to be
True. Read them & judge, if you are not a Fool," -- William Blake,
*Marginalia*

J Seymour MacNicely wrote:

Clearly, the main thing being generated by the stove is not heated air,
but infra-red radiation...

Would you have any evidence for this article of faith?

Nick

On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 13:37:24 -0600, Chris Friesen
wrote:

Mark Lloyd wrote:

Someone once told me that light doesn't exist either. It's an illusion
caused by the lack of darkness. He also claimed to have invented a new
electronic component: the DED (Darkness Emitting Diode).

My brother-in-law came up with the idea of a reverse microwave. Put
something in it and turn it on and it sucks heat out of the object
really quick.

Chris

Is it a superconducting device, which will work when suspended in
liquid nitrogen? I heard of one of those once.
--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.laughingsquid.com

"Unlike biological evolution. 'intelligent design' is
not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has
no place in the curriculum of our nation's public
school classes." -- Ted Kennedy

J Seymour MacNicely wrote:
When it comes to getting the most effective insulation in place, not
only for your dream home, but for your ice-fishing shanty out on the
lake, your doghouse, your out-house, and that cat-house down by the
swamp and the railroad track where you been spending most of your
happy time anyway--it pays to take a few public-spirited things into
consideration . . .

As any fool would seem to know, hot air rises--and Lawd knows there be
plenty enough of it round these here cyber-parts to show the proof of
that. But not every fool is aware of the fact that heat and hot air
are two different things.

Heat is infra-red radiation, and as anyone familiar with the result of
infra-red photography can see, heat is light; it occupies a position
on the spectrum with all the other electro-magnetic wave-forms. In
view of this fact, it would be understood by at least a few half-way
perceptive fools that heat, as infra-red radiation does not require
air, water, cast iron or anything else to be propagated through space.

I came to be thinking on these matters as the result of a major
disappointment over some Styrofoam insulation I installed this year
under the floor of the master bedroom. Though the rest of the house is
heated by a cast iron wood stove, that bedroom is situated such that
not much heat migrates back to that part of the house, so we've been
heating that room with an electric space heater. The goal is to be
able to use that more sparingly.

Now as any fool knows, even a fool hates to be made a fool of,
especially by something like a 50 buck expenditure on foam insulation
that doesn't seem to be making the difference. It still gets very cold
down there near the floor--while most strangely, beneath that floor it
stays fairly warm all the time. It's not a basement but a cement block
walled "crawl space" running from a height at the entrance of about 5
feet where the house is built up over the slope of the ground--and
that's where the master bedroom is.

Some fools will insist that since the earth radiates warmth, this
accounts for all that warm air under the house in such an enclosed
space. If this were the case, then the same would hold true for that
garage size tool shed out there in the back yard--but it doesn't.
It's just so cold inside the shed as it is outside--and its built over
the same ground.

I kept saying to my sweet thing, "Sweet thing, it doesn't stand to
common sense--it's almost as if the heat from the house is going
*down* through the floor into that space under the house!" We spent a
lot of money insulating that bedroom this year, including the bucks we
put down for those R-19 fiber-glass batts that are now installed above
the ceiling. Something plainly cock-eyed is going on here!

Enter the wood-stove . . .

Due to space considerations peculiar to our house, we had to install
the wood-stove a lot closer to the wall than is generally considered
safe. At closest proximity, a ridge of hot cast-iron is only 4 inches
from the painted dry-wall. To avoid danger of fire, I at first
installed a galvanized sheet metal shield behind the stove. On the
wall, it extended so high as the stove-pipe which stands too close as
well, about 7 inches.

I fired up the stove to see how this would work out. As any simple
fool such as myself would suppose; for safety's sake, it would be good
to provide plenty of buffer between the stove and the wall, so for the
shield, I had covered both sides of a three foot square sheet of
plywood to do the job. When the stove was good and hot, I put my hand
on that sheet metal, to find that it was cool to the touch--but the
air in front of it was highly heated. Fool that I am, I stood there
going, "Hot Damn! What is this?"

Not even the hot air flowing over the reflective face of that
galvanized sheet-steel was serving to warm it up. And what manner of
fool would it take not to notice the difference between the warmth of
the wall behind the stove pipe at its seven-inch distance, and the
reflective shield at 4 inches? Something started to penetrate the dim
shield of false knowledge that was installed in my head at school.

When it comes to infra-red radiation of heat, there is no up, down or
sideways about it, it will radiate in any direction as heat,
completely independent of any currents of hot and cold air, gravity or
anything else. Some of the heat radiating from that wood-stove does
of course serve to warm up the air, some goes into the furniture and
into the dry-wall. And that still posed a fire-hazard back there
behind the stove pipe.

I got an idea, quite an unconventional one, but figured what the hell,
it's only for the duration of the winter months, and not really giving
a hot fart what anybody might think of it anyway, I went ahead and
tried another experiment: I took a roll of my wife's ordinary
aluminum foil and stapled that to the wall behind the stove pipe.
Again, it stayed cool to the touch. Well, hot doggies! I removed
that bulky sheet-steel and plywood shield and stapled more aluminum to
the wall as a replacement, so that now runs from floor to ceiling
behind the stove--and it never takes on the least amount of heat.

That's what a fool like me has decided to call "insulation". And now,
as I turn my mind back to the problem of that cold air in the region
near the floor in the bedroom, I come to realize a few things, the
main one being this: forget about what *hot air* does, as it always
goes up in its motion. Forget about air! Infra-red radiation, heat as
such, as waves or rays moves independent of the air, it goes down, it
goes up, and it goes sideways, but the main direction it's going to
move is toward any source of cold that would be drawing it.

Now don't ask a fool like me to explain just how or why a region of
lesser heat or 'cold' would act as a sort of magnet for infra-red
radiation. I am too foolish to have figured that out yet. I just
know from empirical observation of the facts from the master bedroom
that this is the case--from my cold bare feet, I am one fool who knows
what he's talking about here.

Standard home insulation in the form of fiberglass rolls and batts is
there primarily to interfere with, to block a movement of air--not
radiation. It can't do a simple fool thing about the propagation of
infra-red heat rays. That kind of insulation can trap air--but to
what purpose? How much air can be found to move through a three-
quarter inch thick sheet of tightly-packed gypsum wall-board?

Not enough to talk about. Heat radiation from the fire in a stove
will radiate to the air and into the walls, and from the air into the
walls. The heated dry-wall will radiate its heat into the fiber-glass
batting. All the while, cold air on the outside of the house is
drawing heat from the siding, the sheathing and the fiber-glass, and
there is nothing to stop that fiberglass from radiating its store of
infra-red energy, to heat the outside world.

So what earthly good, one well might wonder, is that fiberglass
insulation at all? If its purpose is to stop a flow of air, there are
certainly better, more solid materials suited to do that. If the idea
is to trap air and not just block it, Styrofoam would be the better
candidate because the structure is comprised of closed, impermeable
cells.

So, I am one fool whose mind is totally made up when it soon comes to
the job of building my own home on the land we are soon to buy. I
will not use fiberglass. I will use just two materials: Styrofoam
and aluminum foil.

If I can find the time for it this winter yet, I will go back down
there beneath the bedroom and staple to the face of all that brand new
blue Styrofoam, a single layer of Reynolds Wrap--and then we'll see
just how much of a fool a fool can be, when it comes to the
understanding that heat does not "rise", only hot air does that.
Heat, like all light can be efficiently reflected, and therefore
trapped to be preserved, kept from being drawn away toward any
direction of lesser heat, for example down in the basement, or in the
crawl-space beneath your average damned fool's home.

Heat is light, and like any other wave-length of light, it can be
reflected with very little loss of energy into the reflecting medium.
Like any other kind of light, heat goes right through glass. While
glass can stop the flow of heated air, it will at the same time rob
the air of its heat energy, due to the very low "specific heat" of
glass as a medium (among the coldest in the room) and being
transparent, infra-red radiation like any other sort of light, will
pass right through the glass--without heating the glass itself, same
as happens with foil reflection.

There is not much in a carpet or the boards of a floor to impede the
light that propagates at the infra-red end of the spectrum. True, some
of the heat energy will be dissipated into the carpet and flooring,
bringing heat into those media to be trapped and ever so inefficiently
stored. Wood and polyester fabric, despite whatever quantity of
silicates, are not glass and will not pass the infra-red energy on
without some appreciable loss: there will be molecules of elements in
the wood and in the organic compounds of the carpet that will absorb
and/or reflect heat energy, while the silicates (and whatever other
compounds I am too foolish to know about) will, like glass, allow the
heat radiation to pass through the carpet and the wood.

In short, infra-red radiation, as the form of light energy known as
"heat", does not find an impermeable barrier in wood and carpet, and
that is why it stays warm under my house in the winter. Heat can fall
right through your floor just as easily as it can rise through your
ceiling.

Have you ever heard of anything so foolish?
--
Mackie
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/
"Who Did the Dahlia?"


You are basically right, the heat loss through the floor will
be mainly due to radiation, and foam isn't a very good barrier.
You should have a reflective foil in the floor to stop radiation.

http://www.radiantbarrier.com/physics_of_foil.htm
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/roofs+walls/radiant/index.html

Paul

Dan Espen wrote:
"J Seymour MacNicely" writes:

Now don't ask a fool like me to explain just how or why a region of
lesser heat or 'cold' would act as a sort of magnet for infra-red
radiation. I am too foolish to have figured that out yet. I just
know from empirical observation of the facts from the master bedroom
that this is the case--from my cold bare feet, I am one fool who knows
what he's talking about here.

You can't explain this magnet effect because it doesn't exist.

It exists.
It's called the second law of thermodynamics.

Dan Espen has a point, even if he doesn't express it very well.

http://www.radiantbarrier.com/physics_of_foil.htm

Paul

Now don't ask a fool like me to explain just how or why a region of
lesser heat or 'cold' would act as a sort of magnet for infra-red
radiation.

You can't explain this magnet effect because it doesn't exist.

Soemtimes I come home at night at open the door to my house and all
the dark from outside leaks in. Same thing.

~M

----
http://www.noveltracker.com - top ten novels, ranked hourly. "Looking
for Something to Read?"

Paul B. Andersen wrote:

... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.

Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

Nick

wrote:

Paul B. Andersen wrote:


... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.


Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

Nick

Can you please post a cite for that?

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .

wrote:

Paul B. Andersen wrote:


... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.


Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

Nick

FWIW, this suggests it is NOT:

http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721...1/24882071.pdf

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .

CJT wrote:
wrote:
Paul B. Andersen wrote:

... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.

Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

Can you please post a cite for that?

No thanks.

Nick

CJT wrote:
wrote:
Paul B. Andersen wrote:

... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.

Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

FWIW, this suggests it is NOT:

http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721...1/24882071.pdf

Interesting. I don't see anything there about glass, and it looks like
radiation blocking additives only increased the foam resistance by 6%
(page 3) or 5% (page 32.) An 80% cell wall IR transmittance is less
important with more tiny cells in series, altho that raises the cost
and conductance.

Nick

"CJT" wrote in message
...
wrote:

Paul B. Andersen wrote:


... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.


Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

Nick

Can you please post a cite for that?

--

Not a supporting cite, just a cite.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasc...0/phy00890.htm

On 4 Mar 2007 13:35:35 -0500, wrote:

Paul B. Andersen wrote:

... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.

Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

Nick

You still assume heat is some sort of EM radiation. It still isn't.

Jack R wrote:

You still assume heat is some sort of EM radiation. It still isn't.

Of course it is.

Nick

wrote:

CJT wrote:

wrote:

Paul B. Andersen wrote:


... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.

Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.


FWIW, this suggests it is NOT:

http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721...1/24882071.pdf


Interesting. I don't see anything there about glass,

Perhaps I was unclear. I was addressing the foam issue.

and it looks like
radiation blocking additives only increased the foam resistance by 6%
(page 3) or 5% (page 32.) An 80% cell wall IR transmittance is less
important with more tiny cells in series, altho that raises the cost
and conductance.

Nick

The conclusion is that foam is not opaque.

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .

Eigenvector wrote:

"CJT" wrote in message
...

wrote:


Paul B. Andersen wrote:



... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.


Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

Nick


Can you please post a cite for that?

--


Not a supporting cite, just a cite.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasc...0/phy00890.htm


Sorry, I should have been clearer. The foam portion of the paragraph
is what bothered me. I should have snipped the aside about glass.

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .

Jack R wrote:

On 4 Mar 2007 13:35:35 -0500, wrote:


Paul B. Andersen wrote:


... foam isn't a very good barrier. You should have a reflective foil
in the floor to stop radiation.

Wrong. Foam is opaque., It's an excellent radiation barrier.
Glass is also a longwave IR (heat) barrier.

Nick


You still assume heat is some sort of EM radiation. It still isn't.

Another good point, although in common parlance one considers "heat" to
be transmitted by radiation when it's heat on both ends.

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .

wrote:

Jack R wrote:


You still assume heat is some sort of EM radiation. It still isn't.


Of course it is.

Nick

Huh?

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .

Wow, this is news to me. You mean my foil lined batts I have in my new house
are actually worth the money? THANKS! I knew they had someone else but the
local carpenter working for them.

"Paul B. Andersen" wrote in message
...
J Seymour MacNicely wrote:
When it comes to getting the most effective insulation in place, not
only for your dream home, but for your ice-fishing shanty out on the
lake, your doghouse, your out-house, and that cat-house down by the
swamp and the railroad track where you been spending most of your
happy time anyway--it pays to take a few public-spirited things into
consideration . . .

As any fool would seem to know, hot air rises--and Lawd knows there be
plenty enough of it round these here cyber-parts to show the proof of
that. But not every fool is aware of the fact that heat and hot air
are two different things.

Heat is infra-red radiation, and as anyone familiar with the result of
infra-red photography can see, heat is light; it occupies a position
on the spectrum with all the other electro-magnetic wave-forms. In
view of this fact, it would be understood by at least a few half-way
perceptive fools that heat, as infra-red radiation does not require
air, water, cast iron or anything else to be propagated through space.

I came to be thinking on these matters as the result of a major
disappointment over some Styrofoam insulation I installed this year
under the floor of the master bedroom. Though the rest of the house is
heated by a cast iron wood stove, that bedroom is situated such that
not much heat migrates back to that part of the house, so we've been
heating that room with an electric space heater. The goal is to be
able to use that more sparingly.

Now as any fool knows, even a fool hates to be made a fool of,
especially by something like a 50 buck expenditure on foam insulation
that doesn't seem to be making the difference. It still gets very cold
down there near the floor--while most strangely, beneath that floor it
stays fairly warm all the time. It's not a basement but a cement block
walled "crawl space" running from a height at the entrance of about 5
feet where the house is built up over the slope of the ground--and
that's where the master bedroom is.

Some fools will insist that since the earth radiates warmth, this
accounts for all that warm air under the house in such an enclosed
space. If this were the case, then the same would hold true for that
garage size tool shed out there in the back yard--but it doesn't.
It's just so cold inside the shed as it is outside--and its built over
the same ground.

I kept saying to my sweet thing, "Sweet thing, it doesn't stand to
common sense--it's almost as if the heat from the house is going
*down* through the floor into that space under the house!" We spent a
lot of money insulating that bedroom this year, including the bucks we
put down for those R-19 fiber-glass batts that are now installed above
the ceiling. Something plainly cock-eyed is going on here!

Enter the wood-stove . . .

Due to space considerations peculiar to our house, we had to install
the wood-stove a lot closer to the wall than is generally considered
safe. At closest proximity, a ridge of hot cast-iron is only 4 inches
from the painted dry-wall. To avoid danger of fire, I at first
installed a galvanized sheet metal shield behind the stove. On the
wall, it extended so high as the stove-pipe which stands too close as
well, about 7 inches.

I fired up the stove to see how this would work out. As any simple
fool such as myself would suppose; for safety's sake, it would be good
to provide plenty of buffer between the stove and the wall, so for the
shield, I had covered both sides of a three foot square sheet of
plywood to do the job. When the stove was good and hot, I put my hand
on that sheet metal, to find that it was cool to the touch--but the
air in front of it was highly heated. Fool that I am, I stood there
going, "Hot Damn! What is this?"

Not even the hot air flowing over the reflective face of that
galvanized sheet-steel was serving to warm it up. And what manner of
fool would it take not to notice the difference between the warmth of
the wall behind the stove pipe at its seven-inch distance, and the
reflective shield at 4 inches? Something started to penetrate the dim
shield of false knowledge that was installed in my head at school.

When it comes to infra-red radiation of heat, there is no up, down or
sideways about it, it will radiate in any direction as heat,
completely independent of any currents of hot and cold air, gravity or
anything else. Some of the heat radiating from that wood-stove does
of course serve to warm up the air, some goes into the furniture and
into the dry-wall. And that still posed a fire-hazard back there
behind the stove pipe.

I got an idea, quite an unconventional one, but figured what the hell,
it's only for the duration of the winter months, and not really giving
a hot fart what anybody might think of it anyway, I went ahead and
tried another experiment: I took a roll of my wife's ordinary
aluminum foil and stapled that to the wall behind the stove pipe.
Again, it stayed cool to the touch. Well, hot doggies! I removed
that bulky sheet-steel and plywood shield and stapled more aluminum to
the wall as a replacement, so that now runs from floor to ceiling
behind the stove--and it never takes on the least amount of heat.

That's what a fool like me has decided to call "insulation". And now,
as I turn my mind back to the problem of that cold air in the region
near the floor in the bedroom, I come to realize a few things, the
main one being this: forget about what *hot air* does, as it always
goes up in its motion. Forget about air! Infra-red radiation, heat as
such, as waves or rays moves independent of the air, it goes down, it
goes up, and it goes sideways, but the main direction it's going to
move is toward any source of cold that would be drawing it.

Now don't ask a fool like me to explain just how or why a region of
lesser heat or 'cold' would act as a sort of magnet for infra-red
radiation. I am too foolish to have figured that out yet. I just
know from empirical observation of the facts from the master bedroom
that this is the case--from my cold bare feet, I am one fool who knows
what he's talking about here.

Standard home insulation in the form of fiberglass rolls and batts is
there primarily to interfere with, to block a movement of air--not
radiation. It can't do a simple fool thing about the propagation of
infra-red heat rays. That kind of insulation can trap air--but to
what purpose? How much air can be found to move through a three-
quarter inch thick sheet of tightly-packed gypsum wall-board?

Not enough to talk about. Heat radiation from the fire in a stove
will radiate to the air and into the walls, and from the air into the
walls. The heated dry-wall will radiate its heat into the fiber-glass
batting. All the while, cold air on the outside of the house is
drawing heat from the siding, the sheathing and the fiber-glass, and
there is nothing to stop that fiberglass from radiating its store of
infra-red energy, to heat the outside world.

So what earthly good, one well might wonder, is that fiberglass
insulation at all? If its purpose is to stop a flow of air, there are
certainly better, more solid materials suited to do that. If the idea
is to trap air and not just block it, Styrofoam would be the better
candidate because the structure is comprised of closed, impermeable
cells.

So, I am one fool whose mind is totally made up when it soon comes to
the job of building my own home on the land we are soon to buy. I
will not use fiberglass. I will use just two materials: Styrofoam
and aluminum foil.

If I can find the time for it this winter yet, I will go back down
there beneath the bedroom and staple to the face of all that brand new
blue Styrofoam, a single layer of Reynolds Wrap--and then we'll see
just how much of a fool a fool can be, when it comes to the
understanding that heat does not "rise", only hot air does that.
Heat, like all light can be efficiently reflected, and therefore
trapped to be preserved, kept from being drawn away toward any
direction of lesser heat, for example down in the basement, or in the
crawl-space beneath your average damned fool's home.

Heat is light, and like any other wave-length of light, it can be
reflected with very little loss of energy into the reflecting medium.
Like any other kind of light, heat goes right through glass. While
glass can stop the flow of heated air, it will at the same time rob
the air of its heat energy, due to the very low "specific heat" of
glass as a medium (among the coldest in the room) and being
transparent, infra-red radiation like any other sort of light, will
pass right through the glass--without heating the glass itself, same
as happens with foil reflection.

There is not much in a carpet or the boards of a floor to impede the
light that propagates at the infra-red end of the spectrum. True, some
of the heat energy will be dissipated into the carpet and flooring,
bringing heat into those media to be trapped and ever so inefficiently
stored. Wood and polyester fabric, despite whatever quantity of
silicates, are not glass and will not pass the infra-red energy on
without some appreciable loss: there will be molecules of elements in
the wood and in the organic compounds of the carpet that will absorb
and/or reflect heat energy, while the silicates (and whatever other
compounds I am too foolish to know about) will, like glass, allow the
heat radiation to pass through the carpet and the wood.

In short, infra-red radiation, as the form of light energy known as
"heat", does not find an impermeable barrier in wood and carpet, and
that is why it stays warm under my house in the winter. Heat can fall
right through your floor just as easily as it can rise through your
ceiling.

Have you ever heard of anything so foolish?
--
Mackie
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/
"Who Did the Dahlia?"


You are basically right, the heat loss through the floor will
be mainly due to radiation, and foam isn't a very good barrier.
You should have a reflective foil in the floor to stop radiation.

http://www.radiantbarrier.com/physics_of_foil.htm
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/roofs+walls/radiant/index.html

Paul