On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:18:00 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

In message , Mr Macaw writes

Anyway, the reason I asked is I'm insulating my garage, as I heat it to
keep tropical birds in.

Some years ago, I had a longish single width garage I wanted to use as a
'hobby room', yet allow easy conversion back to garage when selling the
house.

I was lucky enough to have a roll of old carpet which I cut to garage
width, and laid on top of plastic sheet, on the concrete floor. The
plastic and carpet was run the full length of the garage then straight
up at 90 degrees, in front of the metal up and over door, and secured at
the top. Old sheets of chip were cut to length and screwed to the door
frame, over the carpet. Ceiling and all walls, including the chip,
painted white, fluorescent lights installed, job done.

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor?

Quite a bit.

That's the only thing I haven't insulated.

The other effect you get with carpet is that the surface
temperature is a lot closer the air temp so if feel warmer
because you don't radiate from your body to that surface
so much.

Not as good for a room full of birds tho, harder to hose
the **** away.

What I'd do is put joists across with poly sheets between, then a floorboard layer of wood, with a thin layer of concrete on top. Expensive though if most of the heat doesn't go downwards anyway.

--
A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.

On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:14:08 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:49:04 +0100, wrote:

On Sunday, 3 April 2016 20:49:40 UTC+1, Mr Macaw wrote:
I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

I used to have to work in an uninsulated sheet steel and plexiglass cabin
(not a shipping container, a lot less substantial) and the blow heater
going full blast just about kept it warm. Turn the heater off and the
temp plummeted within minutes. No insulative effect at all, it just kept
the wind out.

Steel garage doors are usually very badly fitting too, so lots of
draughts.

I had fitted draught excluders, but I was unaware most of the heat went
through the steel door. I insulated the ceiling first as heat rises.

You were likely losing more thru the door than the ceiling.

It did feel a lot colder when I placed my hand half an inch from the steel door. But I went for the ceiling first because the heat from the radiator was rising up, and flowing along the uninsulated ceiling, so I assumed it was going out before even being used.

--
Why isn't 11 pronounced onety one?

On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:12:52 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:08:37 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"NY" wrote in message
...
"PeterC" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 07:51:44 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 03/04/16 23:47, Thomas Johns wrote:

I'm not convinced that there would
be any difference in that situation.

In fact I know there isnt because I do in fact
have both sheet metal and pyrex baking dishes
and both burn you just as badly if you don't
use something between them and your
hand when taking them out of the oven.

Of course there's a difference. Would you do this with a piece of
ordinary glass or steel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

It's not so much the absolute temperature which is important, but the
rate at which heat is transferred to the skin. Yes, you'd get a burn
with glass or steel, but you are less likely to get it with glass as
the
heat is not transferred so rapidly.

It's heat flow - the less conductive glass loses heat to your hand and
then
more heat has to get 'through' glass from inside.
There was a video of a space shuttle tile heated from underneath until
it
was red hot right through. The reporter put his hand on the top and
wasn't
burned, due to the small amount of enery in the surface and the very
low
conductivity.
If there were a flexible version of those tiles we could have freezers
with
thin walls and a thin cladding on houses. Cost a bit, though.

Why is it that aluminium foil, heated in the oven or under the grill
when
something is cooking, is cool enough touch within seconds of removing it
from the oven/grill, whereas a metal or ceramic dish at the same
temperature stays hot for ages?

Because they foil has next to no thermal inertia/thermal capacity.

Is it because of the small mass of metal close to where your skin is,

Yes, and small mass of metal in total too.

and hence the small amount of energy that is retained in the foil

Yes, there isnt enough to burn you.

relative to the surface area,

Doesn't have anything much to do with surface area.

or is it because the foil rapidly conducts heat away so the temperature
falls very soon after the foil is removed from the heat source?

No, there isnt really anywhere to conduct it away to in that situation.

The air.

That isnt what happens with the foil in that situation.

Never blown on hot food?

--
Confucius say: "Man who sit on tack get point!"

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 16:00:29 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 04/04/16 15:11, News wrote:
In message , Mr Macaw writes
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor? That's the only
thing I haven't insulated.

I don't know, but I did cover the carpet on the floor with scatter rugs,
so it was rugs on carpet, on sheet plastic on concrete. I don't
remember whether I had underlay. The carpet was old and worn, but had
started life as fairly good quality.

its curious, but with solid concrete floors the 'path to the air' is via
a helluva lot of soil, and that gets factored in (the building regs) as
quite a decent insulator.

Wet soil, water is a good conductor. The air around the concrete floor
feels a lot colder than the rest of the room.

That is because of the surface temperature of the concrete.

In order of worseness, Id say a typical garage would have doors worst,
then single glazed windows, then roof, then walls, then floor.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:20:10 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 04:53:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 03/04/16 20:57, Thomas Johns wrote:


"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

Same as a shed with walls done that way.

almost nonexistent.

Maybe there's a shortage of wood in Australia?

Nope. Plenty of the cheaper houses were
done with wood. what we call weatherboard.

Most sheds are wood in the UK.

Some of them are here too, and some are brick too.

I have a brick shed, but only because I was fed up with the wood ones
rotting.

Most of the separate garages here are brick
particularly with the relatively new houses.

Everybody else seems to have wood here.

You don't see too many wooden sheds here
unless the house is wooden/weatherboard here.

The only metal buildings I see are much larger, like barn size.

We do have lots of quite small metal sheds that you
buy and assemble yourself. In fact I had one when
I was building the house, for the bigger stuff like
the wheelbarrow etc. Sold it to a mate of mine
once I moved into the house who was also building
his own house on a bare block of land. I managed
to infect quite a few of my mates with the house
building bug when I did mine. Some like the one
I sold the shed to did most of the work himself,
others did very little. The worst of them only
painted the house himself, and did the block
house quite literally with a large bucket of
paint and a broom.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:18:00 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

In message , Mr Macaw writes

Anyway, the reason I asked is I'm insulating my garage, as I heat it
to
keep tropical birds in.

Some years ago, I had a longish single width garage I wanted to use as
a
'hobby room', yet allow easy conversion back to garage when selling the
house.

I was lucky enough to have a roll of old carpet which I cut to garage
width, and laid on top of plastic sheet, on the concrete floor. The
plastic and carpet was run the full length of the garage then straight
up at 90 degrees, in front of the metal up and over door, and secured
at
the top. Old sheets of chip were cut to length and screwed to the door
frame, over the carpet. Ceiling and all walls, including the chip,
painted white, fluorescent lights installed, job done.

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor?

Quite a bit.

That's the only thing I haven't insulated.

The other effect you get with carpet is that the surface
temperature is a lot closer the air temp so if feel warmer
because you don't radiate from your body to that surface
so much.

Not as good for a room full of birds tho, harder to hose
the **** away.

What I'd do is put joists across with poly sheets between, then a
floorboard layer of wood, with a thin layer of concrete on top. Expensive
though if most of the heat doesn't go downwards anyway.

Yeah, unless it is very wet ground under the concrete,
you wont be losing that much heat that way.

Its actually better to insulate it the way that underfloor heating
is done, put the insulation on top of the current concrete floor
and then pour another slab on top of that.

That is obviously going to raise the floor level a lot tho
and that my not work that well at the door for people
if it has a separate one of those.

On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:48:52 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 16:00:29 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 04/04/16 15:11, News wrote:
In message , Mr Macaw writes
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor? That's the only
thing I haven't insulated.

I don't know, but I did cover the carpet on the floor with scatter rugs,
so it was rugs on carpet, on sheet plastic on concrete. I don't
remember whether I had underlay. The carpet was old and worn, but had
started life as fairly good quality.

its curious, but with solid concrete floors the 'path to the air' is via
a helluva lot of soil, and that gets factored in (the building regs) as
quite a decent insulator.

Wet soil, water is a good conductor. The air around the concrete floor
feels a lot colder than the rest of the room.

That is because of the surface temperature of the concrete.

Which means it must be conducting very well.

I looked it up and R for soil is about 0.25 per inch. But.... it's not as simple as a soil wall is it? What thickness of soil is there between a floor and the outside air? It's not a straight line. And doesn't the heat dissipate forever through the earth's crust downwards? How do you work out the thickness?

--
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that want to get ahead, and those that just want to get head.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:14:08 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:49:04 +0100, wrote:

On Sunday, 3 April 2016 20:49:40 UTC+1, Mr Macaw wrote:
I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

I used to have to work in an uninsulated sheet steel and plexiglass
cabin
(not a shipping container, a lot less substantial) and the blow heater
going full blast just about kept it warm. Turn the heater off and the
temp plummeted within minutes. No insulative effect at all, it just
kept
the wind out.

Steel garage doors are usually very badly fitting too, so lots of
draughts.

I had fitted draught excluders, but I was unaware most of the heat went
through the steel door. I insulated the ceiling first as heat rises.

You were likely losing more thru the door than the ceiling.

It did feel a lot colder when I placed my hand half an inch from the steel
door. But I went for the ceiling first because the heat from the radiator
was rising up, and flowing along the uninsulated ceiling, so I assumed it
was going out before even being used.

It likely wouldn't have been doing that unless the ceiling was very leaky
airflow wise.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:12:52 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:08:37 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"NY" wrote in message
...
"PeterC" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 07:51:44 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 03/04/16 23:47, Thomas Johns wrote:

I'm not convinced that there would
be any difference in that situation.

In fact I know there isnt because I do in fact
have both sheet metal and pyrex baking dishes
and both burn you just as badly if you don't
use something between them and your
hand when taking them out of the oven.

Of course there's a difference. Would you do this with a piece of
ordinary glass or steel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

It's not so much the absolute temperature which is important, but
the
rate at which heat is transferred to the skin. Yes, you'd get a burn
with glass or steel, but you are less likely to get it with glass as
the
heat is not transferred so rapidly.

It's heat flow - the less conductive glass loses heat to your hand
and
then
more heat has to get 'through' glass from inside.
There was a video of a space shuttle tile heated from underneath
until
it
was red hot right through. The reporter put his hand on the top and
wasn't
burned, due to the small amount of enery in the surface and the very
low
conductivity.
If there were a flexible version of those tiles we could have
freezers
with
thin walls and a thin cladding on houses. Cost a bit, though.

Why is it that aluminium foil, heated in the oven or under the grill
when
something is cooking, is cool enough touch within seconds of removing
it
from the oven/grill, whereas a metal or ceramic dish at the same
temperature stays hot for ages?

Because they foil has next to no thermal inertia/thermal capacity.

Is it because of the small mass of metal close to where your skin is,

Yes, and small mass of metal in total too.

and hence the small amount of energy that is retained in the foil

Yes, there isnt enough to burn you.

relative to the surface area,

Doesn't have anything much to do with surface area.

or is it because the foil rapidly conducts heat away so the
temperature
falls very soon after the foil is removed from the heat source?

No, there isnt really anywhere to conduct it away to in that situation.

The air.

That isnt what happens with the foil in that situation.

Never blown on hot food?

The air isnt being blown in the situation being discussed.

On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:10:40 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:20:10 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 04:53:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 03/04/16 20:57, Thomas Johns wrote:


"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

Same as a shed with walls done that way.

almost nonexistent.

Maybe there's a shortage of wood in Australia?

Nope. Plenty of the cheaper houses were
done with wood. what we call weatherboard.

Most sheds are wood in the UK.

Some of them are here too, and some are brick too.

I have a brick shed, but only because I was fed up with the wood ones
rotting.

Most of the separate garages here are brick
particularly with the relatively new houses.

Here too, but not sheds. In case it's named differently over there, here a garage is for a car, and a shed is smaller, for a mower etc.

Everybody else seems to have wood here.

You don't see too many wooden sheds here
unless the house is wooden/weatherboard here.

This is what we have here, most people buy them flatpacked from a DIY sto
http://www.diy.com/departments/outdo.../DIY585870.cat

The only metal buildings I see are much larger, like barn size.

We do have lots of quite small metal sheds that you
buy and assemble yourself.

I see them in shops here, but nobody seems to have bought one. They would last longer than wood.

In fact I had one when
I was building the house, for the bigger stuff like
the wheelbarrow etc. Sold it to a mate of mine
once I moved into the house who was also building
his own house on a bare block of land. I managed
to infect quite a few of my mates with the house
building bug when I did mine. Some like the one
I sold the shed to did most of the work himself,
others did very little. The worst of them only
painted the house himself, and did the block
house quite literally with a large bucket of
paint and a broom.

Sounds fun building a house. Did you get pestered by buildings inspectors all the way through? Or did you just submit a rough plan at the start then get on with it?

--
What's the difference between a hooker and a drug dealer?
A hooker can wash her crack and sell it again.

On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:14:23 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:18:00 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

In message , Mr Macaw writes

Anyway, the reason I asked is I'm insulating my garage, as I heat it
to
keep tropical birds in.

Some years ago, I had a longish single width garage I wanted to use as
a
'hobby room', yet allow easy conversion back to garage when selling the
house.

I was lucky enough to have a roll of old carpet which I cut to garage
width, and laid on top of plastic sheet, on the concrete floor. The
plastic and carpet was run the full length of the garage then straight
up at 90 degrees, in front of the metal up and over door, and secured
at
the top. Old sheets of chip were cut to length and screwed to the door
frame, over the carpet. Ceiling and all walls, including the chip,
painted white, fluorescent lights installed, job done.

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor?

Quite a bit.

That's the only thing I haven't insulated.

The other effect you get with carpet is that the surface
temperature is a lot closer the air temp so if feel warmer
because you don't radiate from your body to that surface
so much.

Not as good for a room full of birds tho, harder to hose
the **** away.

What I'd do is put joists across with poly sheets between, then a
floorboard layer of wood, with a thin layer of concrete on top. Expensive
though if most of the heat doesn't go downwards anyway.

Yeah, unless it is very wet ground under the concrete,
you wont be losing that much heat that way.

Water table here is only 2 feet below the surface in wet weather.

Its actually better to insulate it the way that underfloor heating
is done, put the insulation on top of the current concrete floor
and then pour another slab on top of that.

That is obviously going to raise the floor level a lot tho
and that my not work that well at the door for people
if it has a separate one of those.

A step up to go in isn't a problem, the house is already two steps up.

--
A man came home from work earlier than usual and caught his wife in bed with his best friend.
Enraged, the husband grabbed a gun and shot his friend.
His wife said, "You know, if you go on like this, you're going to lose ALL your friends."

On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:54 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:12:52 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:08:37 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"NY" wrote in message
...
"PeterC" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 07:51:44 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 03/04/16 23:47, Thomas Johns wrote:

I'm not convinced that there would
be any difference in that situation.

In fact I know there isnt because I do in fact
have both sheet metal and pyrex baking dishes
and both burn you just as badly if you don't
use something between them and your
hand when taking them out of the oven.

Of course there's a difference. Would you do this with a piece of
ordinary glass or steel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

It's not so much the absolute temperature which is important, but
the
rate at which heat is transferred to the skin. Yes, you'd get a burn
with glass or steel, but you are less likely to get it with glass as
the
heat is not transferred so rapidly.

It's heat flow - the less conductive glass loses heat to your hand
and
then
more heat has to get 'through' glass from inside.
There was a video of a space shuttle tile heated from underneath
until
it
was red hot right through. The reporter put his hand on the top and
wasn't
burned, due to the small amount of enery in the surface and the very
low
conductivity.
If there were a flexible version of those tiles we could have
freezers
with
thin walls and a thin cladding on houses. Cost a bit, though.

Why is it that aluminium foil, heated in the oven or under the grill
when
something is cooking, is cool enough touch within seconds of removing
it
from the oven/grill, whereas a metal or ceramic dish at the same
temperature stays hot for ages?

Because they foil has next to no thermal inertia/thermal capacity.

Is it because of the small mass of metal close to where your skin is,

Yes, and small mass of metal in total too.

and hence the small amount of energy that is retained in the foil

Yes, there isnt enough to burn you.

relative to the surface area,

Doesn't have anything much to do with surface area.

or is it because the foil rapidly conducts heat away so the
temperature
falls very soon after the foil is removed from the heat source?

No, there isnt really anywhere to conduct it away to in that situation.

The air.

That isnt what happens with the foil in that situation.

Never blown on hot food?

The air isnt being blown in the situation being discussed.

No, but there are always draughts as you remove it from the oven, and of course convection currents. Tin foil is very thin, so it doesn't take long to cool it.

--
Why do men find it difficult to make eye contact?
Breasts don't have eyes.

On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:00 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:14:08 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:49:04 +0100, wrote:

On Sunday, 3 April 2016 20:49:40 UTC+1, Mr Macaw wrote:
I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

I used to have to work in an uninsulated sheet steel and plexiglass
cabin
(not a shipping container, a lot less substantial) and the blow heater
going full blast just about kept it warm. Turn the heater off and the
temp plummeted within minutes. No insulative effect at all, it just
kept
the wind out.

Steel garage doors are usually very badly fitting too, so lots of
draughts.

I had fitted draught excluders, but I was unaware most of the heat went
through the steel door. I insulated the ceiling first as heat rises.

You were likely losing more thru the door than the ceiling.

It did feel a lot colder when I placed my hand half an inch from the steel
door. But I went for the ceiling first because the heat from the radiator
was rising up, and flowing along the uninsulated ceiling, so I assumed it
was going out before even being used.

It likely wouldn't have been doing that unless the ceiling was very leaky
airflow wise.

It was just chipboard with bitumen on top. So probably conducted a lot of heat through it, since it had hot air against it from the radiator, much hotter than the room air.

--
Bumper sticker seen on a B-2 Stealth Bomber:
"IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THEN WE WASTED 50 BILLION BUCKS."

"newshound" wrote in message
o.uk...
On 4/3/2016 9:24 PM, Mr Macaw wrote:
On Sun, 03 Apr 2016 21:19:00 +0100, newshound
wrote:

On 4/3/2016 9:02 PM, Mr Macaw wrote:
On Sun, 03 Apr 2016 20:57:07 +0100, Thomas Johns
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet
of steel?

Same as a shed with walls done that way.

That doesn't help me find what it is, everyone is talking on the web
about insulated sheds. Nobody ever mentions what R is for an
uninsulated one. I know a house brick is 0.8. Is steel worse than
that? A lot worse?

Well for a 1 mm plain steel sheet (which might be a bit thick) the U
will be about 43000 W/m^2K so the R will be 2.3*10^-5 m^2K/W.

A coat of paint or perhaps a plastic coating will make quite a bit of
difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-value_(insulation)

Bloody hell, I didn't know it was that bad. So you're saying a brick
wall has an R of 0.8, and a garage door an R of 0.000023? So a garage
door lets through 35000 times more heat than a brick wall? Are you sure
you have the decimal point in the right place?

I'm reasonably sure MathCAD has put it in the right place. Think about it.
A brick is about 100 times thicker, and metal has much higher conductivity
than ceramics, look up thermal conductivity in Engineering Toolbox, or
other suitable sites.


"Ladybird book of R values"?

--
Adam

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:48:52 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 16:00:29 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 04/04/16 15:11, News wrote:
In message , Mr Macaw writes
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor? That's the
only
thing I haven't insulated.

I don't know, but I did cover the carpet on the floor with scatter
rugs,
so it was rugs on carpet, on sheet plastic on concrete. I don't
remember whether I had underlay. The carpet was old and worn, but had
started life as fairly good quality.

its curious, but with solid concrete floors the 'path to the air' is
via
a helluva lot of soil, and that gets factored in (the building regs) as
quite a decent insulator.

Wet soil, water is a good conductor. The air around the concrete floor
feels a lot colder than the rest of the room.

That is because of the surface temperature of the concrete.

Which means it must be conducting very well.

No, it just has a lot of thermal capacity so it takes a lot
of room heat to warm it up in the garage floor situation.

I do in fact have a lot of concrete floor inside the massive
number of big patio doors all along the N side of my very
long relatively thin house that has the long dimension EW
and the concrete is lovely and warm from the sun falling on
it in winter sunny days. So it isnt actually conducting much
at all in that situation. The concrete does stay warm for
a while once the sun stops shining on it, but nothing like
all night etc.

I looked it up and R for soil is about 0.25 per inch. But.... it's not as
simple as a soil wall is it?

No, because you have deep soil temperature to consider.
That doesn't in fact change all that much from summer
to winter when you go deep enough.

What thickness of soil is there between a floor and the outside air?

It isnt the outside air that matters, it's the deeper soil and what
temperature that is.

It's not a straight line. And doesn't the heat dissipate forever through
the earth's crust downwards?

No, because that very deep soil actually starts to get much warmer.

You see that with the deepest mines.

How do you work out the thickness?

There is no thickness to work out.

The heat flow is quite complex to calculate and you
can't use normal R values and temperature differences.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:10:40 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:20:10 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 04:53:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 03/04/16 20:57, Thomas Johns wrote:


"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

Same as a shed with walls done that way.

almost nonexistent.

Maybe there's a shortage of wood in Australia?

Nope. Plenty of the cheaper houses were
done with wood. what we call weatherboard.

Most sheds are wood in the UK.

Some of them are here too, and some are brick too.

I have a brick shed, but only because I was fed up with the wood ones
rotting.

Most of the separate garages here are brick
particularly with the relatively new houses.

Here too, but not sheds. In case it's named differently over there, here
a garage is for a car, and a shed is smaller, for a mower etc.

Yeah, same terminology here.

We have always had some brick sheds. So have you.

Everybody else seems to have wood here.

You don't see too many wooden sheds here
unless the house is wooden/weatherboard here.

This is what we have here, most people buy them flatpacked from a DIY
sto
http://www.diy.com/departments/outdo.../DIY585870.cat

Yeah, you can get those here too. More commonly those are metal tho.

The only metal buildings I see are much larger, like barn size.

We do have lots of quite small metal sheds that you
buy and assemble yourself.

I see them in shops here, but nobody seems to have bought one.

They're pretty common here. I do see quite a
few of them on the garage/yard sale run.

Lots of people have quite large metal sheds too.

Some of the farmers have ****ing great metal sheds.

They would last longer than wood.

Yeah, they do.

In fact I had one when
I was building the house, for the bigger stuff like
the wheelbarrow etc. Sold it to a mate of mine
once I moved into the house who was also building
his own house on a bare block of land. I managed
to infect quite a few of my mates with the house
building bug when I did mine. Some like the one
I sold the shed to did most of the work himself,
others did very little. The worst of them only
painted the house himself, and did the block
house quite literally with a large bucket of
paint and a broom.

Sounds fun building a house.

Yeah, leaves the average DIY project for dead.
And you get to live in the result too.

Did you get pestered by buildings inspectors all the way through?

Quite the reverse actually. My house has a ****ing great concrete
slab for the entire floor, poured in one go, 100' long, mostly 20' wide.
The crowd that sells the reinforcing mesh for the slab has a system
where you send them a copy of the plan, they send back a plan of
the slab with the composite beams around the outside and the
cross beams across the width of the slab, with how the mesh is
done. The beams have a square section of mesh and all the
mesh is supplied all cut to length etc and you make it all up
using wire ties with are 8" length of with a loop in each end.
You twist the ties with a big tool with a hook in it. You put the
hook thru the loops and then just pull on the tool and it twists
the wire, holding the mesh together at that point.

I just did what the slab plan said to do and had the building
inspector tell the builders in the area to go and look at mine
because that was how it was supposed to be done.

They don't bother to use things called bar chairs which hold
the big sheets of mesh up so the concrete goes under the
mesh and ends up part way thru the slab when it sets. They
just use things with a hook on the end to pull the mesh up
thru the concrete after its been poured in from the readymix
truck. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't always
end up with the mesh where it should be because they have to
stand on the mesh when pulling it up.

The building inspectors inspect the slab reinforcing before the
concrete pours and want to see where the mesh will end up in
the concrete.

Or did you just submit a rough plan at the start then get on with it?

You have to submit a proper plan and they tell you what complys
and what doesn't and when you fix what doesn't, they let you build it.

My house is open plan and one of the toilets and bathrooms
opens off one end of one of the two main rooms and the kitchen
is along one side of those rooms. Our building regulations said
that no toilet could open directly onto the kitchen for some reason.

When the building inspector pointed that out, I just labelled
the area between the kitchen and the toilet as the dining room
without doing anything else but the label and then that was fine.

They can **** that stuff up too. Mate of mine who I infected with
the house building bug had his plans knocked back because the
smallest bedroom was too small. Turned out that they calculated
it wrong, they were using the floor area not counting the built in
wardrobe that was over most of one end. The regs say that built
in wardrobes are included in the area of the bedroom. I told him
to rub the building inspector's nose in that bit of the regs and
once he did that, the plans were approved.

The only quibble I had was with the final inspection that is
required before you can actually move in. I wanted to move
in as soon as possible so I could stop paying rent on the flat
I was renting. The ****wit kept quibbling about silly stuff,
basically because he had decided that if he didn't require
them to be done, they might not ever be done. I didn't
even have the electricity connected and was powering
everything from the builder's temporary supply with
one of those jesus adapters with a plug on each end.

When he said 'the power isnt connected', I said 'the
building regs don't say that all houses have to have
electricity connected'. When he said that the eaves
had not been painted, I said the same thing. They
still haven't been painted 40 years later so he was
right in that sense. After we end thru those, he
realised that there was nothing he could force
me to do so signed it off.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:14:23 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:18:00 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

In message , Mr Macaw writes

Anyway, the reason I asked is I'm insulating my garage, as I heat it
to
keep tropical birds in.

Some years ago, I had a longish single width garage I wanted to use
as
a
'hobby room', yet allow easy conversion back to garage when selling
the
house.

I was lucky enough to have a roll of old carpet which I cut to garage
width, and laid on top of plastic sheet, on the concrete floor. The
plastic and carpet was run the full length of the garage then
straight
up at 90 degrees, in front of the metal up and over door, and secured
at
the top. Old sheets of chip were cut to length and screwed to the
door
frame, over the carpet. Ceiling and all walls, including the chip,
painted white, fluorescent lights installed, job done.

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor?

Quite a bit.

That's the only thing I haven't insulated.

The other effect you get with carpet is that the surface
temperature is a lot closer the air temp so if feel warmer
because you don't radiate from your body to that surface
so much.

Not as good for a room full of birds tho, harder to hose
the **** away.

What I'd do is put joists across with poly sheets between, then a
floorboard layer of wood, with a thin layer of concrete on top.
Expensive
though if most of the heat doesn't go downwards anyway.

Yeah, unless it is very wet ground under the concrete,
you wont be losing that much heat that way.

Water table here is only 2 feet below the surface in wet weather.

That is still 2' of soil, pretty decent insulation.

Its actually better to insulate it the way that underfloor heating
is done, put the insulation on top of the current concrete floor
and then pour another slab on top of that.

That is obviously going to raise the floor level a lot tho
and that my not work that well at the door for people
if it has a separate one of those.

A step up to go in isn't a problem, the house is already two steps up.

Yeah, plenty are like that. I deliberately designed my house
so there is no step up at all. Its actually about 6" above the
surrounding dirt level, but I use a ****ing great thing we
call a digger/back hoe and you lot call a JCB to push the
dirt up to the house and it looks like its all one level.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:54 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:12:52 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:08:37 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"NY" wrote in message
...
"PeterC" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 07:51:44 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 03/04/16 23:47, Thomas Johns wrote:

I'm not convinced that there would
be any difference in that situation.

In fact I know there isnt because I do in fact
have both sheet metal and pyrex baking dishes
and both burn you just as badly if you don't
use something between them and your
hand when taking them out of the oven.

Of course there's a difference. Would you do this with a piece of
ordinary glass or steel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

It's not so much the absolute temperature which is important, but
the
rate at which heat is transferred to the skin. Yes, you'd get a
burn
with glass or steel, but you are less likely to get it with glass
as
the
heat is not transferred so rapidly.

It's heat flow - the less conductive glass loses heat to your hand
and
then
more heat has to get 'through' glass from inside.
There was a video of a space shuttle tile heated from underneath
until
it
was red hot right through. The reporter put his hand on the top and
wasn't
burned, due to the small amount of enery in the surface and the
very
low
conductivity.
If there were a flexible version of those tiles we could have
freezers
with
thin walls and a thin cladding on houses. Cost a bit, though.

Why is it that aluminium foil, heated in the oven or under the grill
when
something is cooking, is cool enough touch within seconds of
removing
it
from the oven/grill, whereas a metal or ceramic dish at the same
temperature stays hot for ages?

Because they foil has next to no thermal inertia/thermal capacity.

Is it because of the small mass of metal close to where your skin
is,

Yes, and small mass of metal in total too.

and hence the small amount of energy that is retained in the foil

Yes, there isnt enough to burn you.

relative to the surface area,

Doesn't have anything much to do with surface area.

or is it because the foil rapidly conducts heat away so the
temperature
falls very soon after the foil is removed from the heat source?

No, there isnt really anywhere to conduct it away to in that
situation.

The air.

That isnt what happens with the foil in that situation.

Never blown on hot food?

The air isnt being blown in the situation being discussed.

No, but there are always draughts as you remove it from the oven, and of
course convection currents. Tin foil is very thin, so it doesn't take
long to cool it.

In practice it's the very low thermal mass that
stops you getting burnt when you touch it.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:00 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:14:08 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:49:04 +0100,
wrote:

On Sunday, 3 April 2016 20:49:40 UTC+1, Mr Macaw wrote:
I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

I used to have to work in an uninsulated sheet steel and plexiglass
cabin
(not a shipping container, a lot less substantial) and the blow
heater
going full blast just about kept it warm. Turn the heater off and the
temp plummeted within minutes. No insulative effect at all, it just
kept
the wind out.

Steel garage doors are usually very badly fitting too, so lots of
draughts.

I had fitted draught excluders, but I was unaware most of the heat
went
through the steel door. I insulated the ceiling first as heat rises.

You were likely losing more thru the door than the ceiling.

It did feel a lot colder when I placed my hand half an inch from the
steel
door. But I went for the ceiling first because the heat from the
radiator
was rising up, and flowing along the uninsulated ceiling, so I assumed
it
was going out before even being used.

It likely wouldn't have been doing that unless the ceiling was very leaky
airflow wise.

It was just chipboard with bitumen on top.

The chipboard is a pretty reasonable insulator.

So probably conducted a lot of heat through it, since it had hot air
against it from the radiator, much hotter than the room air.

It cant have been conducting too much otherwise there wouldn't
have been noticeably hotter air there than in the body of the room.

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:06:43 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:48:52 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 16:00:29 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 04/04/16 15:11, News wrote:
In message , Mr Macaw writes
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor? That's the
only
thing I haven't insulated.

I don't know, but I did cover the carpet on the floor with scatter
rugs,
so it was rugs on carpet, on sheet plastic on concrete. I don't
remember whether I had underlay. The carpet was old and worn, but had
started life as fairly good quality.

its curious, but with solid concrete floors the 'path to the air' is
via
a helluva lot of soil, and that gets factored in (the building regs) as
quite a decent insulator.

Wet soil, water is a good conductor. The air around the concrete floor
feels a lot colder than the rest of the room.

That is because of the surface temperature of the concrete.

Which means it must be conducting very well.

No, it just has a lot of thermal capacity so it takes a lot
of room heat to warm it up in the garage floor situation.

I do in fact have a lot of concrete floor inside the massive
number of big patio doors all along the N side of my very
long relatively thin house that has the long dimension EW
and the concrete is lovely and warm from the sun falling on
it in winter sunny days. So it isnt actually conducting much
at all in that situation. The concrete does stay warm for
a while once the sun stops shining on it, but nothing like
all night etc.

I looked it up and R for soil is about 0.25 per inch. But.... it's not as
simple as a soil wall is it?

No, because you have deep soil temperature to consider.
That doesn't in fact change all that much from summer
to winter when you go deep enough.

What thickness of soil is there between a floor and the outside air?

It isnt the outside air that matters, it's the deeper soil and what
temperature that is.

It's not a straight line. And doesn't the heat dissipate forever through
the earth's crust downwards?

No, because that very deep soil actually starts to get much warmer.

You see that with the deepest mines.

How do you work out the thickness?

There is no thickness to work out.

The heat flow is quite complex to calculate and you
can't use normal R values and temperature differences.

Is there a website explaining how to work it out?

--
A weekend wasted is not a wasted weekend.

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:35:33 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:10:40 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:20:10 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 04:53:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 03/04/16 20:57, Thomas Johns wrote:


"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

Same as a shed with walls done that way.

almost nonexistent.

Maybe there's a shortage of wood in Australia?

Nope. Plenty of the cheaper houses were
done with wood. what we call weatherboard.

Most sheds are wood in the UK.

Some of them are here too, and some are brick too.

I have a brick shed, but only because I was fed up with the wood ones
rotting.

Most of the separate garages here are brick
particularly with the relatively new houses.

Here too, but not sheds. In case it's named differently over there, here
a garage is for a car, and a shed is smaller, for a mower etc.

Yeah, same terminology here.

We have always had some brick sheds. So have you.

Everybody else seems to have wood here.

You don't see too many wooden sheds here
unless the house is wooden/weatherboard here.

This is what we have here, most people buy them flatpacked from a DIY
sto
http://www.diy.com/departments/outdo.../DIY585870.cat

Yeah, you can get those here too. More commonly those are metal tho.

The only metal buildings I see are much larger, like barn size.

We do have lots of quite small metal sheds that you
buy and assemble yourself.

I see them in shops here, but nobody seems to have bought one.

They're pretty common here. I do see quite a
few of them on the garage/yard sale run.

Lots of people have quite large metal sheds too.

Some of the farmers have ****ing great metal sheds.

They would last longer than wood.

Yeah, they do.

In fact I had one when
I was building the house, for the bigger stuff like
the wheelbarrow etc. Sold it to a mate of mine
once I moved into the house who was also building
his own house on a bare block of land. I managed
to infect quite a few of my mates with the house
building bug when I did mine. Some like the one
I sold the shed to did most of the work himself,
others did very little. The worst of them only
painted the house himself, and did the block
house quite literally with a large bucket of
paint and a broom.

Sounds fun building a house.

Yeah, leaves the average DIY project for dead.
And you get to live in the result too.

Did you get pestered by buildings inspectors all the way through?

Quite the reverse actually. My house has a ****ing great concrete
slab for the entire floor, poured in one go, 100' long, mostly 20' wide.

That is a large house! And unusually long - do you have an odd shaped plot of land?

The crowd that sells the reinforcing mesh for the slab has a system
where you send them a copy of the plan, they send back a plan of
the slab with the composite beams around the outside and the
cross beams across the width of the slab, with how the mesh is
done. The beams have a square section of mesh and all the
mesh is supplied all cut to length etc and you make it all up
using wire ties with are 8" length of with a loop in each end.
You twist the ties with a big tool with a hook in it. You put the
hook thru the loops and then just pull on the tool and it twists
the wire, holding the mesh together at that point.

I just did what the slab plan said to do and had the building
inspector tell the builders in the area to go and look at mine
because that was how it was supposed to be done.

They don't bother to use things called bar chairs which hold
the big sheets of mesh up so the concrete goes under the
mesh and ends up part way thru the slab when it sets. They
just use things with a hook on the end to pull the mesh up
thru the concrete after its been poured in from the readymix
truck. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't always
end up with the mesh where it should be because they have to
stand on the mesh when pulling it up.

The building inspectors inspect the slab reinforcing before the
concrete pours and want to see where the mesh will end up in
the concrete.

It's your house, they should mind their own business!

Or did you just submit a rough plan at the start then get on with it?

You have to submit a proper plan and they tell you what complys
and what doesn't and when you fix what doesn't, they let you build it.

My house is open plan and one of the toilets and bathrooms
opens off one end of one of the two main rooms and the kitchen
is along one side of those rooms. Our building regulations said
that no toilet could open directly onto the kitchen for some reason.

When the building inspector pointed that out, I just labelled
the area between the kitchen and the toilet as the dining room
without doing anything else but the label and then that was fine.

What a bunch of clowns.

They can **** that stuff up too. Mate of mine who I infected with
the house building bug had his plans knocked back because the
smallest bedroom was too small. Turned out that they calculated
it wrong, they were using the floor area not counting the built in
wardrobe that was over most of one end. The regs say that built
in wardrobes are included in the area of the bedroom. I told him
to rub the building inspector's nose in that bit of the regs and
once he did that, the plans were approved.

:-)

The only quibble I had was with the final inspection that is
required before you can actually move in. I wanted to move
in as soon as possible so I could stop paying rent on the flat
I was renting. The ****wit kept quibbling about silly stuff,
basically because he had decided that if he didn't require
them to be done, they might not ever be done. I didn't
even have the electricity connected and was powering
everything from the builder's temporary supply with
one of those jesus adapters with a plug on each end.

When he said 'the power isnt connected', I said 'the
building regs don't say that all houses have to have
electricity connected'. When he said that the eaves
had not been painted, I said the same thing. They
still haven't been painted 40 years later so he was
right in that sense. After we end thru those, he
realised that there was nothing he could force
me to do so signed it off.

He sounds like a power hungry maniac. He should have been a policeman or a politician or a teacher.

--
What is the difference between a chicken and a baby?
A chicken is the result of a sitting hen while the baby is the result of a standing cock.

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:40:29 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:14:23 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:18:00 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

In message , Mr Macaw writes

Anyway, the reason I asked is I'm insulating my garage, as I heat it
to
keep tropical birds in.

Some years ago, I had a longish single width garage I wanted to use
as
a
'hobby room', yet allow easy conversion back to garage when selling
the
house.

I was lucky enough to have a roll of old carpet which I cut to garage
width, and laid on top of plastic sheet, on the concrete floor. The
plastic and carpet was run the full length of the garage then
straight
up at 90 degrees, in front of the metal up and over door, and secured
at
the top. Old sheets of chip were cut to length and screwed to the
door
frame, over the carpet. Ceiling and all walls, including the chip,
painted white, fluorescent lights installed, job done.

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor?

Quite a bit.

That's the only thing I haven't insulated.

The other effect you get with carpet is that the surface
temperature is a lot closer the air temp so if feel warmer
because you don't radiate from your body to that surface
so much.

Not as good for a room full of birds tho, harder to hose
the **** away.

What I'd do is put joists across with poly sheets between, then a
floorboard layer of wood, with a thin layer of concrete on top.
Expensive
though if most of the heat doesn't go downwards anyway.

Yeah, unless it is very wet ground under the concrete,
you wont be losing that much heat that way.

Water table here is only 2 feet below the surface in wet weather.

That is still 2' of soil, pretty decent insulation.

Its actually better to insulate it the way that underfloor heating
is done, put the insulation on top of the current concrete floor
and then pour another slab on top of that.

That is obviously going to raise the floor level a lot tho
and that my not work that well at the door for people
if it has a separate one of those.

A step up to go in isn't a problem, the house is already two steps up.

Yeah, plenty are like that. I deliberately designed my house
so there is no step up at all. Its actually about 6" above the
surrounding dirt level, but I use a ****ing great thing we
call a digger/back hoe and you lot call a JCB to push the
dirt up to the house and it looks like its all one level.

I'd not want my house on ground level incase of rain.

--
"The man who invented cats eyes got the idea when he saw a cat facing him in the middle of the road. If the cat had been facing the other way, he would have invented the pencil sharpener." - Ken Dodd.
/
"The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots." -- Dame Rebecca West

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:42:06 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:54 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:12:52 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:08:37 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"NY" wrote in message
...
"PeterC" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 07:51:44 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 03/04/16 23:47, Thomas Johns wrote:

I'm not convinced that there would
be any difference in that situation.

In fact I know there isnt because I do in fact
have both sheet metal and pyrex baking dishes
and both burn you just as badly if you don't
use something between them and your
hand when taking them out of the oven.

Of course there's a difference. Would you do this with a piece of
ordinary glass or steel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

It's not so much the absolute temperature which is important, but
the
rate at which heat is transferred to the skin. Yes, you'd get a
burn
with glass or steel, but you are less likely to get it with glass
as
the
heat is not transferred so rapidly.

It's heat flow - the less conductive glass loses heat to your hand
and
then
more heat has to get 'through' glass from inside.
There was a video of a space shuttle tile heated from underneath
until
it
was red hot right through. The reporter put his hand on the top and
wasn't
burned, due to the small amount of enery in the surface and the
very
low
conductivity.
If there were a flexible version of those tiles we could have
freezers
with
thin walls and a thin cladding on houses. Cost a bit, though.

Why is it that aluminium foil, heated in the oven or under the grill
when
something is cooking, is cool enough touch within seconds of
removing
it
from the oven/grill, whereas a metal or ceramic dish at the same
temperature stays hot for ages?

Because they foil has next to no thermal inertia/thermal capacity.

Is it because of the small mass of metal close to where your skin
is,

Yes, and small mass of metal in total too.

and hence the small amount of energy that is retained in the foil

Yes, there isnt enough to burn you.

relative to the surface area,

Doesn't have anything much to do with surface area.

or is it because the foil rapidly conducts heat away so the
temperature
falls very soon after the foil is removed from the heat source?

No, there isnt really anywhere to conduct it away to in that
situation.

The air.

That isnt what happens with the foil in that situation.

Never blown on hot food?

The air isnt being blown in the situation being discussed.

No, but there are always draughts as you remove it from the oven, and of
course convection currents. Tin foil is very thin, so it doesn't take
long to cool it.

In practice it's the very low thermal mass that
stops you getting burnt when you touch it.

Unless on the inside is a wet chicken.

--
All the American flags on the moon have been bleached by radiation from the sun (which can only be a good thing).

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:45:24 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:00 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:14:08 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:49:04 +0100,
wrote:

On Sunday, 3 April 2016 20:49:40 UTC+1, Mr Macaw wrote:
I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

I used to have to work in an uninsulated sheet steel and plexiglass
cabin
(not a shipping container, a lot less substantial) and the blow
heater
going full blast just about kept it warm. Turn the heater off and the
temp plummeted within minutes. No insulative effect at all, it just
kept
the wind out.

Steel garage doors are usually very badly fitting too, so lots of
draughts.

I had fitted draught excluders, but I was unaware most of the heat
went
through the steel door. I insulated the ceiling first as heat rises.

You were likely losing more thru the door than the ceiling.

It did feel a lot colder when I placed my hand half an inch from the
steel
door. But I went for the ceiling first because the heat from the
radiator
was rising up, and flowing along the uninsulated ceiling, so I assumed
it
was going out before even being used.

It likely wouldn't have been doing that unless the ceiling was very leaky
airflow wise.

It was just chipboard with bitumen on top.

The chipboard is a pretty reasonable insulator.

But it's only 1.5cm thick.

So probably conducted a lot of heat through it, since it had hot air
against it from the radiator, much hotter than the room air.

It cant have been conducting too much otherwise there wouldn't
have been noticeably hotter air there than in the body of the room.

It was only hotter there because of the large radiator blasting it up there. By the time it moved along the ceiling and started down the opposite wall, it didn't feel as hot.

--
All the American flags on the moon have been bleached by radiation from the sun (which can only be a good thing).

On 04/04/16 08:40, Thomas Johns wrote:


Of course there's a difference. Would you do this with a piece of ordinary
glass or steel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

Nothing even remotely relevant to the situation being discussed.

It's relevant because it's all the same thing - the rate of heat
transfer. It just happens to be an extreme example. If it was possible
to create a cube of metal "foam" of similar density to the silica one, I
guarantee you wouldn't be able to pick that one up without getting a
severe burn at the contact points with your skin.

It's not so much the absolute temperature which is important, but the rate
at which heat is transferred to the skin. Yes, you'd get a burn with glass
or steel, but you are less likely to get it with glass as the heat is not
transferred so rapidly.

I dont believe that with the situation he was discussing,
a glass beaker with 100C water in it and a metal one.

Yes, it's the same thing again. It's how fast heat is transferred to
your skin. You won't be able to hold a container of glass or metal with
boiling water in it, but the metal one will likely leave you with a burn
and blistering, whereas the glass one won't.

--

Jeff

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 18:08:39 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 04/04/16 08:40, Thomas Johns wrote:


Of course there's a difference. Would you do this with a piece of ordinary
glass or steel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

Nothing even remotely relevant to the situation being discussed.

It's relevant because it's all the same thing - the rate of heat
transfer. It just happens to be an extreme example. If it was possible
to create a cube of metal "foam" of similar density to the silica one, I
guarantee you wouldn't be able to pick that one up without getting a
severe burn at the contact points with your skin.

It's not so much the absolute temperature which is important, but the rate
at which heat is transferred to the skin. Yes, you'd get a burn with glass
or steel, but you are less likely to get it with glass as the heat is not
transferred so rapidly.

I dont believe that with the situation he was discussing,
a glass beaker with 100C water in it and a metal one.

Yes, it's the same thing again. It's how fast heat is transferred to
your skin. You won't be able to hold a container of glass or metal with
boiling water in it, but the metal one will likely leave you with a burn
and blistering, whereas the glass one won't.

Neither would, you'd let go. The metal one you'd drop on the floor, the glass one you'd have time to put down.

--
Marital Status: Not Good
Wife's Name: Plaintiff

En el artículo , Jeff Layman
escribió:

It's relevant

You're arguing with one of the resident troll's many nyms. You're
wasting your time.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=) Windows 10: less of an OS, more of a drive-by mugging.
(")_(") -- "Esme" on el Reg

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:06:43 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:48:52 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 16:00:29 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 04/04/16 15:11, News wrote:
In message , Mr Macaw
writes
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News

wrote:

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught
proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor? That's the
only
thing I haven't insulated.

I don't know, but I did cover the carpet on the floor with scatter
rugs,
so it was rugs on carpet, on sheet plastic on concrete. I don't
remember whether I had underlay. The carpet was old and worn, but
had
started life as fairly good quality.

its curious, but with solid concrete floors the 'path to the air' is
via
a helluva lot of soil, and that gets factored in (the building regs)
as
quite a decent insulator.

Wet soil, water is a good conductor. The air around the concrete
floor
feels a lot colder than the rest of the room.

That is because of the surface temperature of the concrete.

Which means it must be conducting very well.

No, it just has a lot of thermal capacity so it takes a lot
of room heat to warm it up in the garage floor situation.

I do in fact have a lot of concrete floor inside the massive
number of big patio doors all along the N side of my very
long relatively thin house that has the long dimension EW
and the concrete is lovely and warm from the sun falling on
it in winter sunny days. So it isnt actually conducting much
at all in that situation. The concrete does stay warm for
a while once the sun stops shining on it, but nothing like
all night etc.

I looked it up and R for soil is about 0.25 per inch. But.... it's not
as
simple as a soil wall is it?

No, because you have deep soil temperature to consider.
That doesn't in fact change all that much from summer
to winter when you go deep enough.

What thickness of soil is there between a floor and the outside air?

It isnt the outside air that matters, it's the deeper soil and what
temperature that is.

It's not a straight line. And doesn't the heat dissipate forever
through
the earth's crust downwards?

No, because that very deep soil actually starts to get much warmer.

You see that with the deepest mines.

How do you work out the thickness?

There is no thickness to work out.

The heat flow is quite complex to calculate and you
can't use normal R values and temperature differences.

Is there a website explaining how to work it out?

Likely. I did mine before web sites had even been
invented so couldn't use one for my calculations.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=O4o_AAAAYAAJ
likely does include the calculations but there is no ebook
version of that available. Mate of mine wrote it, now dead.

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:12:00 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:06:43 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:48:52 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 16:00:29 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 04/04/16 15:11, News wrote:
In message , Mr Macaw
writes
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News

wrote:

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught
proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor? That's the
only
thing I haven't insulated.

I don't know, but I did cover the carpet on the floor with scatter
rugs,
so it was rugs on carpet, on sheet plastic on concrete. I don't
remember whether I had underlay. The carpet was old and worn, but
had
started life as fairly good quality.

its curious, but with solid concrete floors the 'path to the air' is
via
a helluva lot of soil, and that gets factored in (the building regs)
as
quite a decent insulator.

Wet soil, water is a good conductor. The air around the concrete
floor
feels a lot colder than the rest of the room.

That is because of the surface temperature of the concrete.

Which means it must be conducting very well.

No, it just has a lot of thermal capacity so it takes a lot
of room heat to warm it up in the garage floor situation.

I do in fact have a lot of concrete floor inside the massive
number of big patio doors all along the N side of my very
long relatively thin house that has the long dimension EW
and the concrete is lovely and warm from the sun falling on
it in winter sunny days. So it isnt actually conducting much
at all in that situation. The concrete does stay warm for
a while once the sun stops shining on it, but nothing like
all night etc.

I looked it up and R for soil is about 0.25 per inch. But.... it's not
as
simple as a soil wall is it?

No, because you have deep soil temperature to consider.
That doesn't in fact change all that much from summer
to winter when you go deep enough.

What thickness of soil is there between a floor and the outside air?

It isnt the outside air that matters, it's the deeper soil and what
temperature that is.

It's not a straight line. And doesn't the heat dissipate forever
through
the earth's crust downwards?

No, because that very deep soil actually starts to get much warmer.

You see that with the deepest mines.

How do you work out the thickness?

There is no thickness to work out.

The heat flow is quite complex to calculate and you
can't use normal R values and temperature differences.

Is there a website explaining how to work it out?

Likely. I did mine before web sites had even been
invented so couldn't use one for my calculations.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=O4o_AAAAYAAJ
likely does include the calculations but there is no ebook
version of that available. Mate of mine wrote it, now dead.

There is a free ebook, but it wanted credit card details for a free month's signup. I didn't bother.

--
Engage brain before putting fingers in gear.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:35:33 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:10:40 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:20:10 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 04:53:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 03/04/16 20:57, Thomas Johns wrote:


"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value
of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a
simple
sheet of steel?

Same as a shed with walls done that way.

almost nonexistent.

Maybe there's a shortage of wood in Australia?

Nope. Plenty of the cheaper houses were
done with wood. what we call weatherboard.

Most sheds are wood in the UK.

Some of them are here too, and some are brick too.

I have a brick shed, but only because I was fed up with the wood ones
rotting.

Most of the separate garages here are brick
particularly with the relatively new houses.

Here too, but not sheds. In case it's named differently over there,
here
a garage is for a car, and a shed is smaller, for a mower etc.

Yeah, same terminology here.

We have always had some brick sheds. So have you.

Everybody else seems to have wood here.

You don't see too many wooden sheds here
unless the house is wooden/weatherboard here.

This is what we have here, most people buy them flatpacked from a DIY
sto
http://www.diy.com/departments/outdo.../DIY585870.cat

Yeah, you can get those here too. More commonly those are metal tho.

The only metal buildings I see are much larger, like barn size.

We do have lots of quite small metal sheds that you
buy and assemble yourself.

I see them in shops here, but nobody seems to have bought one.

They're pretty common here. I do see quite a
few of them on the garage/yard sale run.

Lots of people have quite large metal sheds too.

Some of the farmers have ****ing great metal sheds.

They would last longer than wood.

Yeah, they do.

In fact I had one when
I was building the house, for the bigger stuff like
the wheelbarrow etc. Sold it to a mate of mine
once I moved into the house who was also building
his own house on a bare block of land. I managed
to infect quite a few of my mates with the house
building bug when I did mine. Some like the one
I sold the shed to did most of the work himself,
others did very little. The worst of them only
painted the house himself, and did the block
house quite literally with a large bucket of
paint and a broom.

Sounds fun building a house.

Yeah, leaves the average DIY project for dead.
And you get to live in the result too.

Did you get pestered by buildings inspectors all the way through?

Quite the reverse actually. My house has a ****ing great concrete
slab for the entire floor, poured in one go, 100' long, mostly 20' wide.

That is a large house!

Yep. Single level, what you lot call a bungalow.

And unusually long

That's to provide a maximum of solar capture area.

It's got a 6' eave all down that side of the house,
so the sun come right thru the house in the winter
but no sun comes in at all in the summer. That 6'
was calculated using a solar angle calculator.

- do you have an odd shaped plot of land?

Nar, standard 150'x50' block. I picked the block
so that it runs EW and there is a small park on
the S side, so no neighbour on that side. No
windows on the E or W walls at all to avoid
any sun coming in thru those in the summer.

We can have 10 days in a row over 40C and the
last thing you need in that sort of weather is sun
coming into the house that way.

The crowd that sells the reinforcing mesh for the slab has a system
where you send them a copy of the plan, they send back a plan of
the slab with the composite beams around the outside and the
cross beams across the width of the slab, with how the mesh is
done. The beams have a square section of mesh and all the
mesh is supplied all cut to length etc and you make it all up
using wire ties with are 8" length of with a loop in each end.
You twist the ties with a big tool with a hook in it. You put the
hook thru the loops and then just pull on the tool and it twists
the wire, holding the mesh together at that point.

I just did what the slab plan said to do and had the building
inspector tell the builders in the area to go and look at mine
because that was how it was supposed to be done.

They don't bother to use things called bar chairs which hold
the big sheets of mesh up so the concrete goes under the
mesh and ends up part way thru the slab when it sets. They
just use things with a hook on the end to pull the mesh up
thru the concrete after its been poured in from the readymix
truck. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't always
end up with the mesh where it should be because they have to
stand on the mesh when pulling it up.

The building inspectors inspect the slab reinforcing before the
concrete pours and want to see where the mesh will end up in
the concrete.

It's your house, they should mind their own business!

None of the first or second world does it like that now.

Or did you just submit a rough plan at the start then get on with it?

You have to submit a proper plan and they tell you what complys
and what doesn't and when you fix what doesn't, they let you build it.

My house is open plan and one of the toilets and bathrooms
opens off one end of one of the two main rooms and the kitchen
is along one side of those rooms. Our building regulations said
that no toilet could open directly onto the kitchen for some reason.

When the building inspector pointed that out, I just labelled
the area between the kitchen and the toilet as the dining room
without doing anything else but the label and then that was fine.

What a bunch of clowns.

They can **** that stuff up too. Mate of mine who I infected with
the house building bug had his plans knocked back because the
smallest bedroom was too small. Turned out that they calculated
it wrong, they were using the floor area not counting the built in
wardrobe that was over most of one end. The regs say that built
in wardrobes are included in the area of the bedroom. I told him
to rub the building inspector's nose in that bit of the regs and
once he did that, the plans were approved.

:-)

The only quibble I had was with the final inspection that is
required before you can actually move in. I wanted to move
in as soon as possible so I could stop paying rent on the flat
I was renting. The ****wit kept quibbling about silly stuff,
basically because he had decided that if he didn't require
them to be done, they might not ever be done. I didn't
even have the electricity connected and was powering
everything from the builder's temporary supply with
one of those jesus adapters with a plug on each end.

When he said 'the power isnt connected', I said 'the
building regs don't say that all houses have to have
electricity connected'. When he said that the eaves
had not been painted, I said the same thing. They
still haven't been painted 40 years later so he was
right in that sense. After we end thru those, he
realised that there was nothing he could force
me to do so signed it off.

He sounds like a power hungry maniac.

He basically was trying to avoid a half built
house left like that after I had moved in.

He should have been a policeman or a politician or a teacher.

Even more of a terminal ****wit with the electricity supply
people. The traditional thing with the builder's temporary
supply was to use what had once been a 10' tree, with the
branches removed. Plant that ground and attach the
metal meter box, what lot call a CU, to that with a couple
of metal straps with where the box goes planed off a bit
do provide a flat bit for the back of the box.

The clown in charge decided that that was no longer good
enough and that everyone had to use a 4"x4"x10' planed
wooden beam planted in the ground instead.

For some reason everyone called him Piggy Schmidt.
Schmidt was his last name.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:40:29 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:14:23 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:18:00 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

In message , Mr Macaw
writes

Anyway, the reason I asked is I'm insulating my garage, as I heat
it
to
keep tropical birds in.

Some years ago, I had a longish single width garage I wanted to use
as
a
'hobby room', yet allow easy conversion back to garage when selling
the
house.

I was lucky enough to have a roll of old carpet which I cut to
garage
width, and laid on top of plastic sheet, on the concrete floor.
The
plastic and carpet was run the full length of the garage then
straight
up at 90 degrees, in front of the metal up and over door, and
secured
at
the top. Old sheets of chip were cut to length and screwed to the
door
frame, over the carpet. Ceiling and all walls, including the chip,
painted white, fluorescent lights installed, job done.

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught
proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor?

Quite a bit.

That's the only thing I haven't insulated.

The other effect you get with carpet is that the surface
temperature is a lot closer the air temp so if feel warmer
because you don't radiate from your body to that surface
so much.

Not as good for a room full of birds tho, harder to hose
the **** away.

What I'd do is put joists across with poly sheets between, then a
floorboard layer of wood, with a thin layer of concrete on top.
Expensive
though if most of the heat doesn't go downwards anyway.

Yeah, unless it is very wet ground under the concrete,
you wont be losing that much heat that way.

Water table here is only 2 feet below the surface in wet weather.

That is still 2' of soil, pretty decent insulation.

Its actually better to insulate it the way that underfloor heating
is done, put the insulation on top of the current concrete floor
and then pour another slab on top of that.

That is obviously going to raise the floor level a lot tho
and that my not work that well at the door for people
if it has a separate one of those.

A step up to go in isn't a problem, the house is already two steps up.

Yeah, plenty are like that. I deliberately designed my house
so there is no step up at all. Its actually about 6" above the
surrounding dirt level, but I use a ****ing great thing we
call a digger/back hoe and you lot call a JCB to push the
dirt up to the house and it looks like its all one level.

I'd not want my house on ground level incase of rain.

That is why its 6" higher than the surrounding ground.

We did in fact have a mega deluge about 10 years after
it had been built which saw water inches deep in the street
but no water inside the house at all. I actually run the
sprinklers in the park on the S side of the house, it's a
council park. I normally leave them on all night and
you end up with a massive great sheet of standing
water in the lowest part but that soaks away in a few
hours after you turn the sprinklers off and it never
even spreads onto any of my land, let alone inside
the house. There is no fence on that side so my land
and the park flow into each other and it gives the
visual effect that its all mine. The council mows it
with a ****ing great tractor and mows mine at the
same time because I run the sprinklers for them.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:45:24 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:00 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:14:08 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:49:04 +0100,
wrote:

On Sunday, 3 April 2016 20:49:40 UTC+1, Mr Macaw wrote:
I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value
of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

I used to have to work in an uninsulated sheet steel and plexiglass
cabin
(not a shipping container, a lot less substantial) and the blow
heater
going full blast just about kept it warm. Turn the heater off and
the
temp plummeted within minutes. No insulative effect at all, it just
kept
the wind out.

Steel garage doors are usually very badly fitting too, so lots of
draughts.

I had fitted draught excluders, but I was unaware most of the heat
went
through the steel door. I insulated the ceiling first as heat
rises.

You were likely losing more thru the door than the ceiling.

It did feel a lot colder when I placed my hand half an inch from the
steel
door. But I went for the ceiling first because the heat from the
radiator
was rising up, and flowing along the uninsulated ceiling, so I assumed
it
was going out before even being used.

It likely wouldn't have been doing that unless the ceiling was very
leaky
airflow wise.

It was just chipboard with bitumen on top.

The chipboard is a pretty reasonable insulator.

But it's only 1.5cm thick.

Still a lot better than the metal door or a single sheet of glass.

So probably conducted a lot of heat through it, since it had hot air
against it from the radiator, much hotter than the room air.

It cant have been conducting too much otherwise there wouldn't
have been noticeably hotter air there than in the body of the room.

It was only hotter there because of the large radiator blasting it up
there. By the time it moved along the ceiling and started down the
opposite wall, it didn't feel as hot.

Sure, but it was still where less heat escaping there than the uninsulated
walls.

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:27:53 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:35:33 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:10:40 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:20:10 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 04:53:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 03/04/16 20:57, Thomas Johns wrote:


"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value
of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a
simple
sheet of steel?

Same as a shed with walls done that way.

almost nonexistent.

Maybe there's a shortage of wood in Australia?

Nope. Plenty of the cheaper houses were
done with wood. what we call weatherboard.

Most sheds are wood in the UK.

Some of them are here too, and some are brick too.

I have a brick shed, but only because I was fed up with the wood ones
rotting.

Most of the separate garages here are brick
particularly with the relatively new houses.

Here too, but not sheds. In case it's named differently over there,
here
a garage is for a car, and a shed is smaller, for a mower etc.

Yeah, same terminology here.

We have always had some brick sheds. So have you.

Everybody else seems to have wood here.

You don't see too many wooden sheds here
unless the house is wooden/weatherboard here.

This is what we have here, most people buy them flatpacked from a DIY
sto
http://www.diy.com/departments/outdo.../DIY585870.cat

Yeah, you can get those here too. More commonly those are metal tho.

The only metal buildings I see are much larger, like barn size.

We do have lots of quite small metal sheds that you
buy and assemble yourself.

I see them in shops here, but nobody seems to have bought one.

They're pretty common here. I do see quite a
few of them on the garage/yard sale run.

Lots of people have quite large metal sheds too.

Some of the farmers have ****ing great metal sheds.

They would last longer than wood.

Yeah, they do.

In fact I had one when
I was building the house, for the bigger stuff like
the wheelbarrow etc. Sold it to a mate of mine
once I moved into the house who was also building
his own house on a bare block of land. I managed
to infect quite a few of my mates with the house
building bug when I did mine. Some like the one
I sold the shed to did most of the work himself,
others did very little. The worst of them only
painted the house himself, and did the block
house quite literally with a large bucket of
paint and a broom.

Sounds fun building a house.

Yeah, leaves the average DIY project for dead.
And you get to live in the result too.

Did you get pestered by buildings inspectors all the way through?

Quite the reverse actually. My house has a ****ing great concrete
slab for the entire floor, poured in one go, 100' long, mostly 20' wide.

That is a large house!

Yep. Single level, what you lot call a bungalow.

And unusually long

That's to provide a maximum of solar capture area.

It's got a 6' eave all down that side of the house,
so the sun come right thru the house in the winter
but no sun comes in at all in the summer. That 6'
was calculated using a solar angle calculator.

That's a good idea. I'd never have thought of making the sun come in only at certain times of year.

- do you have an odd shaped plot of land?

Nar, standard 150'x50' block.

Most round me are square.

I picked the block
so that it runs EW and there is a small park on
the S side, so no neighbour on that side. No
windows on the E or W walls at all to avoid
any sun coming in thru those in the summer.

We can have 10 days in a row over 40C and the
last thing you need in that sort of weather is sun
coming into the house that way.

The crowd that sells the reinforcing mesh for the slab has a system
where you send them a copy of the plan, they send back a plan of
the slab with the composite beams around the outside and the
cross beams across the width of the slab, with how the mesh is
done. The beams have a square section of mesh and all the
mesh is supplied all cut to length etc and you make it all up
using wire ties with are 8" length of with a loop in each end.
You twist the ties with a big tool with a hook in it. You put the
hook thru the loops and then just pull on the tool and it twists
the wire, holding the mesh together at that point.

I just did what the slab plan said to do and had the building
inspector tell the builders in the area to go and look at mine
because that was how it was supposed to be done.

They don't bother to use things called bar chairs which hold
the big sheets of mesh up so the concrete goes under the
mesh and ends up part way thru the slab when it sets. They
just use things with a hook on the end to pull the mesh up
thru the concrete after its been poured in from the readymix
truck. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't always
end up with the mesh where it should be because they have to
stand on the mesh when pulling it up.

The building inspectors inspect the slab reinforcing before the
concrete pours and want to see where the mesh will end up in
the concrete.

It's your house, they should mind their own business!

None of the first or second world does it like that now.

Doesn't make it right. The only things they should check is anything that would affect another property.

Or did you just submit a rough plan at the start then get on with it?

You have to submit a proper plan and they tell you what complys
and what doesn't and when you fix what doesn't, they let you build it.

My house is open plan and one of the toilets and bathrooms
opens off one end of one of the two main rooms and the kitchen
is along one side of those rooms. Our building regulations said
that no toilet could open directly onto the kitchen for some reason.

When the building inspector pointed that out, I just labelled
the area between the kitchen and the toilet as the dining room
without doing anything else but the label and then that was fine.

What a bunch of clowns.

They can **** that stuff up too. Mate of mine who I infected with
the house building bug had his plans knocked back because the
smallest bedroom was too small. Turned out that they calculated
it wrong, they were using the floor area not counting the built in
wardrobe that was over most of one end. The regs say that built
in wardrobes are included in the area of the bedroom. I told him
to rub the building inspector's nose in that bit of the regs and
once he did that, the plans were approved.

:-)

The only quibble I had was with the final inspection that is
required before you can actually move in. I wanted to move
in as soon as possible so I could stop paying rent on the flat
I was renting. The ****wit kept quibbling about silly stuff,
basically because he had decided that if he didn't require
them to be done, they might not ever be done. I didn't
even have the electricity connected and was powering
everything from the builder's temporary supply with
one of those jesus adapters with a plug on each end.

When he said 'the power isnt connected', I said 'the
building regs don't say that all houses have to have
electricity connected'. When he said that the eaves
had not been painted, I said the same thing. They
still haven't been painted 40 years later so he was
right in that sense. After we end thru those, he
realised that there was nothing he could force
me to do so signed it off.

He sounds like a power hungry maniac.

He basically was trying to avoid a half built
house left like that after I had moved in.

Your house, none of anyone's business.

He should have been a policeman or a politician or a teacher.

Even more of a terminal ****wit with the electricity supply
people. The traditional thing with the builder's temporary
supply was to use what had once been a 10' tree, with the
branches removed. Plant that ground and attach the
metal meter box, what lot call a CU, to that with a couple
of metal straps with where the box goes planed off a bit
do provide a flat bit for the back of the box.

The clown in charge decided that that was no longer good
enough and that everyone had to use a 4"x4"x10' planed
wooden beam planted in the ground instead.

A tree would be much firmer! What he's suggesting is LESS safe.

I would have reported him to his superiors.

For some reason everyone called him Piggy Schmidt.
Schmidt was his last name.

--
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:34:03 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:40:29 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:14:23 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:18:00 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News
wrote:

In message , Mr Macaw
writes

Anyway, the reason I asked is I'm insulating my garage, as I heat
it
to
keep tropical birds in.

Some years ago, I had a longish single width garage I wanted to use
as
a
'hobby room', yet allow easy conversion back to garage when selling
the
house.

I was lucky enough to have a roll of old carpet which I cut to
garage
width, and laid on top of plastic sheet, on the concrete floor.
The
plastic and carpet was run the full length of the garage then
straight
up at 90 degrees, in front of the metal up and over door, and
secured
at
the top. Old sheets of chip were cut to length and screwed to the
door
frame, over the carpet. Ceiling and all walls, including the chip,
painted white, fluorescent lights installed, job done.

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught
proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor?

Quite a bit.

That's the only thing I haven't insulated.

The other effect you get with carpet is that the surface
temperature is a lot closer the air temp so if feel warmer
because you don't radiate from your body to that surface
so much.

Not as good for a room full of birds tho, harder to hose
the **** away.

What I'd do is put joists across with poly sheets between, then a
floorboard layer of wood, with a thin layer of concrete on top.
Expensive
though if most of the heat doesn't go downwards anyway.

Yeah, unless it is very wet ground under the concrete,
you wont be losing that much heat that way.

Water table here is only 2 feet below the surface in wet weather.

That is still 2' of soil, pretty decent insulation.

Its actually better to insulate it the way that underfloor heating
is done, put the insulation on top of the current concrete floor
and then pour another slab on top of that.

That is obviously going to raise the floor level a lot tho
and that my not work that well at the door for people
if it has a separate one of those.

A step up to go in isn't a problem, the house is already two steps up.

Yeah, plenty are like that. I deliberately designed my house
so there is no step up at all. Its actually about 6" above the
surrounding dirt level, but I use a ****ing great thing we
call a digger/back hoe and you lot call a JCB to push the
dirt up to the house and it looks like its all one level.

I'd not want my house on ground level incase of rain.

That is why its 6" higher than the surrounding ground.

We did in fact have a mega deluge about 10 years after
it had been built which saw water inches deep in the street
but no water inside the house at all. I actually run the
sprinklers in the park on the S side of the house, it's a
council park. I normally leave them on all night and
you end up with a massive great sheet of standing
water in the lowest part but that soaks away in a few
hours after you turn the sprinklers off and it never
even spreads onto any of my land, let alone inside
the house. There is no fence on that side so my land
and the park flow into each other and it gives the
visual effect that its all mine. The council mows it
with a ****ing great tractor and mows mine at the
same time because I run the sprinklers for them.

I thought you had water meters in Australia?

--
"I can't find a cause for your illness," the doctor said. "Frankly, I think it's due to drinking."
"In that case," replied his blonde patient, "I'll come back when you're sober."

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:37:44 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:45:24 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:00 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:14:08 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:49:04 +0100,
wrote:

On Sunday, 3 April 2016 20:49:40 UTC+1, Mr Macaw wrote:
I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value
of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a simple
sheet of steel?

I used to have to work in an uninsulated sheet steel and plexiglass
cabin
(not a shipping container, a lot less substantial) and the blow
heater
going full blast just about kept it warm. Turn the heater off and
the
temp plummeted within minutes. No insulative effect at all, it just
kept
the wind out.

Steel garage doors are usually very badly fitting too, so lots of
draughts.

I had fitted draught excluders, but I was unaware most of the heat
went
through the steel door. I insulated the ceiling first as heat
rises.

You were likely losing more thru the door than the ceiling.

It did feel a lot colder when I placed my hand half an inch from the
steel
door. But I went for the ceiling first because the heat from the
radiator
was rising up, and flowing along the uninsulated ceiling, so I assumed
it
was going out before even being used.

It likely wouldn't have been doing that unless the ceiling was very
leaky
airflow wise.

It was just chipboard with bitumen on top.

The chipboard is a pretty reasonable insulator.

But it's only 1.5cm thick.

Still a lot better than the metal door or a single sheet of glass.

Yes, but "heat rises" is important isn't it?

So probably conducted a lot of heat through it, since it had hot air
against it from the radiator, much hotter than the room air.

It cant have been conducting too much otherwise there wouldn't
have been noticeably hotter air there than in the body of the room.

It was only hotter there because of the large radiator blasting it up
there. By the time it moved along the ceiling and started down the
opposite wall, it didn't feel as hot.

Sure, but it was still where less heat escaping there than the uninsulated
walls.

The walls were single brick. Only the front was steel.

--
Advice for office managers:
If you keep the sexual harassment complaint forms in the bottom drawer, then when a woman gets one out you'll get a great view of her arse.

On 4/4/2016 10:21 AM, NY wrote:
"PeterC" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 4 Apr 2016 07:51:44 +0100, Jeff Layman wrote:

On 03/04/16 23:47, Thomas Johns wrote:

I'm not convinced that there would
be any difference in that situation.

In fact I know there isnt because I do in fact
have both sheet metal and pyrex baking dishes
and both burn you just as badly if you don't
use something between them and your
hand when taking them out of the oven.

Of course there's a difference. Would you do this with a piece of
ordinary glass or steel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

It's not so much the absolute temperature which is important, but the
rate at which heat is transferred to the skin. Yes, you'd get a burn
with glass or steel, but you are less likely to get it with glass as the
heat is not transferred so rapidly.

It's heat flow - the less conductive glass loses heat to your hand and
then
more heat has to get 'through' glass from inside.
There was a video of a space shuttle tile heated from underneath until it
was red hot right through. The reporter put his hand on the top and
wasn't
burned, due to the small amount of enery in the surface and the very low
conductivity.
If there were a flexible version of those tiles we could have freezers
with
thin walls and a thin cladding on houses. Cost a bit, though.

Why is it that aluminium foil, heated in the oven or under the grill
when something is cooking, is cool enough touch within seconds of
removing it from the oven/grill, whereas a metal or ceramic dish at the
same temperature stays hot for ages? Is it because of the small mass of
metal close to where your skin is, and hence the small amount of energy
that is retained in the foil relative to the surface area, or is it
because the foil rapidly conducts heat away so the temperature falls
very soon after the foil is removed from the heat source?

Yes, it's a combination of conductivity, specific heat, and geometry.
With aluminium foil, there is so little metal there that convection to
the air or conduction to your skin removes the small amount of thermal
energy available. That's partly because of the low mass, and partly
because metals have a much lower specific heat than non-metals.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:27:53 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:35:33 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:10:40 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:20:10 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 04:53:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 03/04/16 20:57, Thomas Johns wrote:


"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the
R-value
of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a
simple
sheet of steel?

Same as a shed with walls done that way.

almost nonexistent.

Maybe there's a shortage of wood in Australia?

Nope. Plenty of the cheaper houses were
done with wood. what we call weatherboard.

Most sheds are wood in the UK.

Some of them are here too, and some are brick too.

I have a brick shed, but only because I was fed up with the wood
ones
rotting.

Most of the separate garages here are brick
particularly with the relatively new houses.

Here too, but not sheds. In case it's named differently over there,
here
a garage is for a car, and a shed is smaller, for a mower etc.

Yeah, same terminology here.

We have always had some brick sheds. So have you.

Everybody else seems to have wood here.

You don't see too many wooden sheds here
unless the house is wooden/weatherboard here.

This is what we have here, most people buy them flatpacked from a DIY
sto
http://www.diy.com/departments/outdo.../DIY585870.cat

Yeah, you can get those here too. More commonly those are metal tho.

The only metal buildings I see are much larger, like barn size.

We do have lots of quite small metal sheds that you
buy and assemble yourself.

I see them in shops here, but nobody seems to have bought one.

They're pretty common here. I do see quite a
few of them on the garage/yard sale run.

Lots of people have quite large metal sheds too.

Some of the farmers have ****ing great metal sheds.

They would last longer than wood.

Yeah, they do.

In fact I had one when
I was building the house, for the bigger stuff like
the wheelbarrow etc. Sold it to a mate of mine
once I moved into the house who was also building
his own house on a bare block of land. I managed
to infect quite a few of my mates with the house
building bug when I did mine. Some like the one
I sold the shed to did most of the work himself,
others did very little. The worst of them only
painted the house himself, and did the block
house quite literally with a large bucket of
paint and a broom.

Sounds fun building a house.

Yeah, leaves the average DIY project for dead.
And you get to live in the result too.

Did you get pestered by buildings inspectors all the way through?

Quite the reverse actually. My house has a ****ing great concrete
slab for the entire floor, poured in one go, 100' long, mostly 20'
wide.

That is a large house!

Yep. Single level, what you lot call a bungalow.

And unusually long

That's to provide a maximum of solar capture area.

It's got a 6' eave all down that side of the house,
so the sun come right thru the house in the winter
but no sun comes in at all in the summer. That 6'
was calculated using a solar angle calculator.

That's a good idea. I'd never have thought of making the sun come in only
at certain times of year.

- do you have an odd shaped plot of land?

Nar, standard 150'x50' block.

Most round me are square.

Almost none of ours are.

I picked the block
so that it runs EW and there is a small park on
the S side, so no neighbour on that side. No
windows on the E or W walls at all to avoid
any sun coming in thru those in the summer.

We can have 10 days in a row over 40C and the
last thing you need in that sort of weather is sun
coming into the house that way.

The crowd that sells the reinforcing mesh for the slab has a system
where you send them a copy of the plan, they send back a plan of
the slab with the composite beams around the outside and the
cross beams across the width of the slab, with how the mesh is
done. The beams have a square section of mesh and all the
mesh is supplied all cut to length etc and you make it all up
using wire ties with are 8" length of with a loop in each end.
You twist the ties with a big tool with a hook in it. You put the
hook thru the loops and then just pull on the tool and it twists
the wire, holding the mesh together at that point.

I just did what the slab plan said to do and had the building
inspector tell the builders in the area to go and look at mine
because that was how it was supposed to be done.

They don't bother to use things called bar chairs which hold
the big sheets of mesh up so the concrete goes under the
mesh and ends up part way thru the slab when it sets. They
just use things with a hook on the end to pull the mesh up
thru the concrete after its been poured in from the readymix
truck. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't always
end up with the mesh where it should be because they have to
stand on the mesh when pulling it up.

The building inspectors inspect the slab reinforcing before the
concrete pours and want to see where the mesh will end up in
the concrete.

It's your house, they should mind their own business!

None of the first or second world does it like that now.

Doesn't make it right. The only things they should check is anything that
would affect another property.

You can make a case for it being safe to live in too.

Or did you just submit a rough plan at the start then get on with it?

You have to submit a proper plan and they tell you what complys
and what doesn't and when you fix what doesn't, they let you build it.

My house is open plan and one of the toilets and bathrooms
opens off one end of one of the two main rooms and the kitchen
is along one side of those rooms. Our building regulations said
that no toilet could open directly onto the kitchen for some reason.

When the building inspector pointed that out, I just labelled
the area between the kitchen and the toilet as the dining room
without doing anything else but the label and then that was fine.

What a bunch of clowns.

They can **** that stuff up too. Mate of mine who I infected with
the house building bug had his plans knocked back because the
smallest bedroom was too small. Turned out that they calculated
it wrong, they were using the floor area not counting the built in
wardrobe that was over most of one end. The regs say that built
in wardrobes are included in the area of the bedroom. I told him
to rub the building inspector's nose in that bit of the regs and
once he did that, the plans were approved.

:-)

The only quibble I had was with the final inspection that is
required before you can actually move in. I wanted to move
in as soon as possible so I could stop paying rent on the flat
I was renting. The ****wit kept quibbling about silly stuff,
basically because he had decided that if he didn't require
them to be done, they might not ever be done. I didn't
even have the electricity connected and was powering
everything from the builder's temporary supply with
one of those jesus adapters with a plug on each end.

When he said 'the power isnt connected', I said 'the
building regs don't say that all houses have to have
electricity connected'. When he said that the eaves
had not been painted, I said the same thing. They
still haven't been painted 40 years later so he was
right in that sense. After we end thru those, he
realised that there was nothing he could force
me to do so signed it off.

He sounds like a power hungry maniac.

He basically was trying to avoid a half built
house left like that after I had moved in.

Your house, none of anyone's business.

He should have been a policeman or a politician or a teacher.

Even more of a terminal ****wit with the electricity supply
people. The traditional thing with the builder's temporary
supply was to use what had once been a 10' tree, with the
branches removed. Plant that ground and attach the
metal meter box, what lot call a CU, to that with a couple
of metal straps with where the box goes planed off a bit
do provide a flat bit for the back of the box.

The clown in charge decided that that was no longer good
enough and that everyone had to use a 4"x4"x10' planed
wooden beam planted in the ground instead.

A tree would be much firmer! What he's suggesting is LESS safe.

Yeah, that's why it was so stupid.

I would have reported him to his superiors.

He didn't have any on that stuff.

Same with the building inspectors.

For some reason everyone called him Piggy Schmidt.
Schmidt was his last name.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:34:03 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:40:29 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:14:23 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:18:00 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:03:37 +0100, News

wrote:

In message , Mr Macaw
writes

Anyway, the reason I asked is I'm insulating my garage, as I
heat
it
to
keep tropical birds in.

Some years ago, I had a longish single width garage I wanted to
use
as
a
'hobby room', yet allow easy conversion back to garage when
selling
the
house.

I was lucky enough to have a roll of old carpet which I cut to
garage
width, and laid on top of plastic sheet, on the concrete floor.
The
plastic and carpet was run the full length of the garage then
straight
up at 90 degrees, in front of the metal up and over door, and
secured
at
the top. Old sheets of chip were cut to length and screwed to
the
door
frame, over the carpet. Ceiling and all walls, including the
chip,
painted white, fluorescent lights installed, job done.

No idea about R values, but it did make a large, cosy, draught
proof
room, that was easily converted back to a garage. There was, of
course,
a separate personal access door.

I wonder how much is lost through the concrete floor?

Quite a bit.

That's the only thing I haven't insulated.

The other effect you get with carpet is that the surface
temperature is a lot closer the air temp so if feel warmer
because you don't radiate from your body to that surface
so much.

Not as good for a room full of birds tho, harder to hose
the **** away.

What I'd do is put joists across with poly sheets between, then a
floorboard layer of wood, with a thin layer of concrete on top.
Expensive
though if most of the heat doesn't go downwards anyway.

Yeah, unless it is very wet ground under the concrete,
you wont be losing that much heat that way.

Water table here is only 2 feet below the surface in wet weather.

That is still 2' of soil, pretty decent insulation.

Its actually better to insulate it the way that underfloor heating
is done, put the insulation on top of the current concrete floor
and then pour another slab on top of that.

That is obviously going to raise the floor level a lot tho
and that my not work that well at the door for people
if it has a separate one of those.

A step up to go in isn't a problem, the house is already two steps up.

Yeah, plenty are like that. I deliberately designed my house
so there is no step up at all. Its actually about 6" above the
surrounding dirt level, but I use a ****ing great thing we
call a digger/back hoe and you lot call a JCB to push the
dirt up to the house and it looks like its all one level.

I'd not want my house on ground level incase of rain.

That is why its 6" higher than the surrounding ground.

We did in fact have a mega deluge about 10 years after
it had been built which saw water inches deep in the street
but no water inside the house at all. I actually run the
sprinklers in the park on the S side of the house, it's a
council park. I normally leave them on all night and
you end up with a massive great sheet of standing
water in the lowest part but that soaks away in a few
hours after you turn the sprinklers off and it never
even spreads onto any of my land, let alone inside
the house. There is no fence on that side so my land
and the park flow into each other and it gives the
visual effect that its all mine. The council mows it
with a ****ing great tractor and mows mine at the
same time because I run the sprinklers for them.

I thought you had water meters in Australia?

We do, but that is the council's water supply in the park.

"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:37:44 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:45:24 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 21:16:00 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 20:14:08 +0100, Rod Speed

wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Mon, 04 Apr 2016 10:49:04 +0100,
wrote:

On Sunday, 3 April 2016 20:49:40 UTC+1, Mr Macaw wrote:
I looked everywhere on Google, and all I can find is the R-value
of
insulated garage doors (which I didn't even know existed!).
What is the R-value of a traditional garage door, made of a
simple
sheet of steel?

I used to have to work in an uninsulated sheet steel and
plexiglass
cabin
(not a shipping container, a lot less substantial) and the blow
heater
going full blast just about kept it warm. Turn the heater off and
the
temp plummeted within minutes. No insulative effect at all, it
just
kept
the wind out.

Steel garage doors are usually very badly fitting too, so lots of
draughts.

I had fitted draught excluders, but I was unaware most of the heat
went
through the steel door. I insulated the ceiling first as heat
rises.

You were likely losing more thru the door than the ceiling.

It did feel a lot colder when I placed my hand half an inch from the
steel
door. But I went for the ceiling first because the heat from the
radiator
was rising up, and flowing along the uninsulated ceiling, so I
assumed
it
was going out before even being used.

It likely wouldn't have been doing that unless the ceiling was very
leaky
airflow wise.

It was just chipboard with bitumen on top.

The chipboard is a pretty reasonable insulator.

But it's only 1.5cm thick.

Still a lot better than the metal door or a single sheet of glass.

Yes, but "heat rises" is important isn't it?

So probably conducted a lot of heat through it, since it had hot air
against it from the radiator, much hotter than the room air.

It cant have been conducting too much otherwise there wouldn't
have been noticeably hotter air there than in the body of the room.

It was only hotter there because of the large radiator blasting it up
there. By the time it moved along the ceiling and started down the
opposite wall, it didn't feel as hot.

Sure, but it was still where less heat escaping there than the
uninsulated
walls.

The walls were single brick. Only the front was steel.

Yeah, that's what I meant. You were in fact losing more thru the walls
and door than you were thru the ceiling before you insulated anything.

On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 22:01:09 +0100, Rod Speed wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message news
On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 20:27:53 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:



"Mr Macaw" wrote in message
news On Tue, 05 Apr 2016 02:35:33 +0100, Rod Speed
wrote:

The crowd that sells the reinforcing mesh for the slab has a system
where you send them a copy of the plan, they send back a plan of
the slab with the composite beams around the outside and the
cross beams across the width of the slab, with how the mesh is
done. The beams have a square section of mesh and all the
mesh is supplied all cut to length etc and you make it all up
using wire ties with are 8" length of with a loop in each end.
You twist the ties with a big tool with a hook in it. You put the
hook thru the loops and then just pull on the tool and it twists
the wire, holding the mesh together at that point.

I just did what the slab plan said to do and had the building
inspector tell the builders in the area to go and look at mine
because that was how it was supposed to be done.

They don't bother to use things called bar chairs which hold
the big sheets of mesh up so the concrete goes under the
mesh and ends up part way thru the slab when it sets. They
just use things with a hook on the end to pull the mesh up
thru the concrete after its been poured in from the readymix
truck. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't always
end up with the mesh where it should be because they have to
stand on the mesh when pulling it up.

The building inspectors inspect the slab reinforcing before the
concrete pours and want to see where the mesh will end up in
the concrete.

It's your house, they should mind their own business!

None of the first or second world does it like that now.

Doesn't make it right. The only things they should check is anything that
would affect another property.

You can make a case for it being safe to live in too.

That's one of the main things wrong with modern society, the law forcing you to be safe to yourself. ****'s sake that is intrinsically nobody's business but yours.

--
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death -- Albert Einstein