Home Insulation - Primary Necessity

In temperate countries where there is winter, home insulation is simply a necessity to make your houses (including buildings used for work) warmer and comfortable. It also works at beating the expensive costs of heaters (and air conditioners during summer).

While the initial expenses for having insulation of your home may be substantial enough, this one-time expenditure beats by a mile the yearly heating (and cooling) expenses you have to fork over. In practical terms once you do the math, the best part is that the cost will pay for itself after some time.

House types

New houses at present are now usually built with good insulation standards as compared to the older houses built some years back (maybe 20 years ago). The owners of these still-existing houses are retro-fitting their structural insulation to improve its energy efficiency (and reduce further payments).

The really new houses are now insulated very properly and air-tight as they are. In fact, these houses do not need any heating system at all. The new technology actually uses the heat of the sun to produce the heat they need with some help from electrical equipments.

Heat transfer

The bulk of the population still believes that heat only goes up. It does, but only in the convection process. In reality, heat moves in all ways. (There are about five ways heat moves about or can be transferred.)

The heat that is transferred between solids (metals and other materials) is called conduction. The heat that you feel when you are near a hot object (heater or stove or fire) is called radiation. This is one of the electromagnetic ways of energy transfer much along the manner of radio waves, electricity and light.

Convection

The natural tendency of warm air (or other gases and water) to move up and the cold materials to go down is convection, and heat also gets transferred this way.  The result is the natural circulation of  air (or water). This is what engineers use in heating radiators.

Evaporation is the process where moving molecules move out from the main materials (water and other solids) and into the atmosphere. The remaining material becomes cool in the process because the molecules are slow-moving or maybe even inert.  

Drafts also cause heat loss, taking warm air from the insides of homes to the outside. The same effect is also felt by the body when a blast of wind blows in and takes away hot air and water molecules from your body.

Insulation

There are now many good products to use in insulating your home. These would include mineral and glass wools, as well as slabs (they come as blankets and rolls) and batts. Since they are of higher density, they provide 25% greater insulation.

Sheep’s wool also gives good insulation among the natural fabrics that include cotton and hemp. Mineral and glass wool products are also as good wooden doors and loft boards. All these are about the more popular materials for home insulation. The only question now is how any of which will fit into your project, economically and physically.