4 ms·
Another approach is to heat the interior walls and ceiling instead of heating the air. Neglecting clothes for a few minutes, your body both radiates heat and a
by hasmanean 3y ago
Another approach is to heat the interior walls and ceiling instead of heating the air.
Neglecting clothes for a few minutes, your body both radiates heat and absorbs it. When you are in thermal equilibrium you feel warm. If your walls and roof had low grade radiant heaters on them and emitted enough infrared to balance your own outgoing radiation, you’d be warm, even if the air temperature was cold and you had no clothes on.
So if you covered your ceiling with cheap thin iron sheet metal and built small induction coils behind them and heated the ceiling instantly, you could instantly feel warm in a cool room. Exit the room and you turn everything off…letting it lose its tiny amount of heat.
So proper system design could let you have low latency zone heating. Since you usually don’t use all the rooms in your house at the same time, there ought to be more than 50% efficiency in that sort of a system.
2. Our current approach of heating the whole house through forced air is much less satisfying than having a concentrated heat source (like a fireplace) that you can just walk towards and get as much heat as you want out of. Maybe psychological factors might play in…if you “could” be warm with just a little bit of effort maybe you won’t mind being colder than normal. Maybe heat gradients are better for you than uniformly high heat.
- zimpenfish 3y ago> heated the ceiling instantly, you could instantly feel warm in a cool room Having lived in a place with ceiling heating, after the first couple of uses, I turned it off because it did nothing more than give me a headache.
- hasmanean 3y agoA headache how? Because of noise or too much heat up above you?
- zimpenfish 3y agoThere was no noise, thankfully - the headache was from the heat (which only really reached about a couple of feet down from the ceiling.)
- cousin_it 3y agoHmm, I'd expect that our bodies mostly exchange heat with their surroundings by conduction, not radiation. So a heater that warms me up by radiation feels a bit suspicious. Are you sure it'll have no negative health effects?
- pjc50 3y agoWe've been heated by (primarily) radiative heating since the invention of fire.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoWhich is precisely what needs to change now that we have billions of people with reasonable expectations of not being cold.
- kseistrup 3y agoI'd prefer floor heating. Your feet will never again feel cold during the colder seasons + warm air travels upwards, thus distributing the heat to the entire room.
- LunaSea 3y agoAs far as I know, floor heating is bad for blood flow and can cause various health issues.
- margalabargala 3y agoGot a source? This doesn't make sense to me.
- kseistrup 3y agoThe first article I found when searching for “floor heating health” concludes: > »A warm floor can induce high blood perfusion in the feet and consequently improve an occupant's health by treating many vascular-related disorders.« https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19120501/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19120501/ The article is from 2008, so there could be newer — or just other — articles out there coming to the opposite conclusion, but it does sound counter-intuitive that it should be bad for the blood flow. I'm willing to change my mind, though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- infecto 3y agoI am thinking this is already solved. Radiant floor heating.
- shellfishgene 3y agoYou can buy infrared heaters that are exacly this. They are easy to install and often look nice, like a picture or mirror. Also they of course heat the furniture and everything, too, so with the low efficiency of electric heating it's not a great option.