I’ve always read and experienced that warm floors provide the best heating, bc our bodies are more comfortable with the warm heat rising. Ceiling heating seems counter intuitive.
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Radiation.
Warms your body, not the air around you.
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… well yes I sure hope these folks get a warmer building, sounds good so far…
… ok not ideal. The study chooses fast and hassle-free instead of physics. I wonder how much harder it would have been to furnish each of the 12 dwelling with an electric rug you can walk on… e.g.:
I get it that children, pets, stiletto heels, heavy furniture, heavy foot traffic, etc. must be factored in.
But.
Heat moves in three ways: convection, conduction, and [black body] radiation.
In a better world, the warming surface (the electric wallpaper) would be far better placed on the floor than the ceiling. Heat rises. All the warmest air is already at the top of the room. In Iceland, they put their [geothermal] heating system in the house floor:
https://www.infloor.com/why-infloor/project-showcase/geothermal-power/
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Koreans discovered the benefits of heated floors centuries millennia ago, and variations of that are still common there today. I spent a few winter months in an apartment there with heated floors and it was certainly nice when walking around barefoot.
But as others have noted they really should focus on fixing the poor insulation first and then it won’t matter too much where the heat comes from.
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[ Vitruvius has entered the chat ]
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I like how they try to sell this as if it’s any greener than any other radiant electric heating technology.
Also, don’t walls typically have, I don’t know, furniture, art, etc. against them? I’d hate to have to choose between having a fully furnished room and a warm room.
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And if we just reverse the polarity, we can use it to cool them in summer!
/s
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Ad it’s a double shame that this product isn’t very special, because it looks like there won’t be any help from the UK government, if their actions in the other nations that are currently part of the UK is anything to go by:
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I for one, welcome being surrounded on five sides by botnets.
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As others have said, the best solution is to do this the hard way by taking the time to improve the weatherization and insulation of existing buildings. Alternatively they might need to tear down old buildings and replace them with newer, better buildings but i presume there’s quite a number of historic structures where such a plan would not be considered. So go back to plan A and improve the weatherization, as difficult as that might be it’s a hell of a lot better than increasing the odds of burning it down with shoddy “electric wallpaper”. It seems like such a haphazard solution that i’m immediately suspicious of it.
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Yeah, I guess saying “centuries ago” was a significant understatement. Shame it still hasn’t really caught on more widely.
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If Koreans didn’t get the idea from Rome or Greece (and I doubt they did), you weren’t exactly wrong.
Anyway, who cares who came up with the idea and implemented it first? It’s a great idea!
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An idea so nice, humanity invented it twice*
or thrice, etc.
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A problem with a lot of the solutions that require adding insulation to walls or floors means a disruption to the people living there, generally needing them to move out for a time if you need to do the work inside the property. Adding it to the ceiling is the least efficient but also the least disruptive.
Would be good if they are adding an insulation layer as well, though if they are doing this as a research project they may well want to do a few different combinations to see what works.
Housing Associations and council housing was screwed over by Thatcher and subsequent governments have never been willing to do more than token changes, so any fixes are going to be minimum cost and not the best long term solutions.
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The Scottish Government is committed to Net Zero by 2045, which is admirable and very ambitious. This “solution” smacks of cheapish, easy-to-install and roll out to a high number of properties without requiring tenants to move out and possibly achieve that target.
More of a sticking plaster that could produce more problems than the more obvious answer of extensive insulation and move to electric heating. However, it is only one of several proposals being trialled.
Unlike that pesky sun? (a rare commodity in Scotland)
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(excerpt) “Hoots mon” means ‘hey you’ or ‘hey man’, but it is not actually used by Scottish people at all. It is more of a joke word, cliché, or fun take on the Scots language pronunciation.
It is used in popular culture as a stereotypical Scottish phrase used as an interjection, probably invented by non-scots. “Hoot mon” would be closer to an actual phrase used by Scots - “That was a hoot man!”, meaning that was so much fun.
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I was thinking of Scandinavian Scøts not Hot Scots
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I was attempting to pivot from Hoot Mon! to Hot Mon! re the heated Scottish wallpaper. See edit above in a couple of minutes.
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