Der Science assignment

1.      The heating system in my house is a forced-air heating system. It works by forcing hot air with a fan throughout the house until it cools and falls into one of the return ducts situated around the house. Then it circulates through ducts back to the furnace which heats the air again and the air is forced through the hot-air duct again, repeating the cycle.

2. (sorry too lazy to upload image)

3. Some areas that could have potential heat loss are the windows, which are very old, due to the fact that the house we live in is about 40 years old. These windows are double paned, but I think the sealing for the panes of glass has long worn out and there is obvious air leakage through the windows. If you stand near the bottom left corner of our living room window (which is around 2.5 meters by 1.25 meters) and feel the air surrounding the sealing, it is noticeable colder. Later, when I tested this with a laser thermometer it was much colder than say, the middle of the room. I believe in many homes this happens because no matter what there will always be radiation and windows are conveniently one of the only areas without insulation that is also in contact with the outside world. Obviously the best way to prevent this is to build a house with no windows or doors, but if you think about it that would not be aesthetically pleasing at all, so to add windows, you would have to have a reasonably new double pane window to successfully block some of the radiating heat, but the sealing on that also wears out quickly. One of my proposed ideas is to resort to a window with many compartments, each vacuum sealed. The sealant between the panes would be Aerogel, which is an extremely rubberlike synthetic porous material that is extremely flexible and can preserve heat extremely well (it can also support a 2.5 kilogram brick even though its mass is only 2 grams, just an interesting tidbit). Aerogel is reasonable costly though, so it can be replaced with normal synthetic rubber, or perlite, or fiberglass, which all insulate exceptionally well.

Another spot where heat may leak out of my house is the doors. My house currently has 2 doors, one to access the backyard, and one front door. Both seem to be of the same brand and make and both seem to be at least 5 years old. They work well, but there is still noticeable leakage around the edges (and the mail slot for the front door, even though we never use it). I’ve always noticed that you can’t really seal a door very well, because you can’t guarantee that a device used to open and close can insulate heat exceptionally well, so the only way to truly improve the sealing around the doors is to make 2 doors, with a vacuum room in between. Upon entering, the first door would open and the room would empty its cold air and fill with warm air, upon which the second door would open. When I discussed this with my parents however, it became an obvious no (budget, I suppose).

The final spot in which there could be leakage would be the roof. Several months ago, whey my dad ventured into the attic to check on the insulation, we found that the roof was slightly moist (it was made of wood). I know this is because of condensation, which means there must have been enough heat escaping from the insulation to cause condensation with the cold air from outside the roof and in the cold frigid winter of Canada. What I thought was strange was that, even though there was existing insulation that seemed like it had not suffered any severe damage, there was still enough heat escaping to cause condensation, which is disappointing, because we paid a large amount of money for that little bit of pink fluff. The obvious answer to this question is to purchase newer, more efficient insulation so that it would lose less heat, but I believe that it probably won’t change the amount of preserved heat by that much. This is a huge disappointment to me, because I think creating a better insulator can’t be that hard, but maybe it is because the “insulation” market is not really large and a few companies pretty much dominate that industry.

Another way to prevent loss of heat though, and this one is extravagant, but works surprisingly well, is to simply make a basic bricklike house, and cover it entirely in dirt, leaving small gaps for windows. This would obviously prevent heat from escaping well, simply because there is so much dirt covering the house, that heat has a tiny chance of escaping. This is also probably why animals dig holes or “burrows” to hibernate in, just to prevent heat loss, because when animals are in a state of hibernation, there is a tiny amount of heat produced, so they must preserve as much of it as they can. If animals can successfully use this technique to prevent heat loss reasonably effectively, then why can’t we use this technique?