Home Insulation - Home Styles, Heat, and Insulation Materials

By its name, home insulation says it all – insulating your house from extreme cold or extreme heat. If you haven’t yet, insulating your home is simply to make your house warmer and comfortable. Insulating it is better than having heaters in winter (or air conditioners) to beat cold or heat.

Insulating your home may take some substantial expense. However, it is a one-time expense as compared to your heating expenses which you have to pay every year, year in and year out. With the insulation expense you made, you van be sure that it will pay for itself based on your yearly heating expense.

Different makes

These days, new homes are already built with good insulation standards compared to the old ones. (These may be houses built more than 20 years ago.) New owners of these old houses are retro-fitting them to improve their insulation quotient and improve their energy efficiency.

The new houses are insulated very well. Most are also done air-tight so they need not have a heating system. These days, the sun’s energy (coming from the windows) is being utilized to heat the homes with a bit of help from electrical equipments (whose costs are very minimal).

Heat transfer

Many people are still under the impression that heart goes up, and nowhere else. In the convection process, heat goes up. In reality, heat goes in all ways (five to be exact) that heat can move about or is transferred.

Conduction is the name of the heat transfer between solids. The heat you can feel if you are near a hot object is radiation.  This is an electromagnetic form of energy transfer like light, electricity or radio.

Convection

Convection is the movement of warm air (or other gases and water) to move up, while those that are cold (cold air or water) go down. The result is circulation of either air or water. This is the heating technique they use in heating radiators.

Evaporation is not usually connected with heat loss. However, you can see the water evaporating on a summer day after a heavy rain. If you perspire, and the air takes up some evaporated sweat from you, you feel cooler.

Draughts are also one way of losing heat, with the warm air from within the home is let out into the outside.

Materials

There are now many good materials to use as home insulators. They include the mineral and glass wools, and on a denser form as batts and slabs. These come in blankets and rolls. They have about 25% greater insulation index compared to the others.

Fortunately, there are now many good products for use as your home insulators. They include the common mineral and glass wools, and on a denser forms as batts or slabs. (They come in blankets forms or rolls.) Because of higher density, they have around 25% greater insulation.

Among the natural fibers, sheep’s wool is a good one, like cotton or hemp. Mineral and glass wools are also very good. All of these materials can make good home insulation.