Your Body Is A Radiator

HeatingHelp

Your Body Is A Radiator

Our bodies are radiators. We generate heat. Half the heat we lose leaves our bodies as radiant energy, moving toward things that are cooler than 86°. When you control the rate of heat loss from your body, you also control your degree of comfort. It’s that simple.

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OldPro69

Just stand in an unheated concrete basement on a cold day. You can feel the radiant cold through your clothes. The concrete is sucking the heat from your body radiantly.

Leonc

Love the insight.
Does this mean radiant cooling is superior as well? Or does this mean moving air through a room is more effective at making a person feel cooler on a hot day?
Thanks for the article!

jeant

I always love the way Dan connects common experiences to help us all paint the marvels of radiant heating to the temperature comfort we sense with our bodies.

jeant

When Dan says, "There’s also less heat loss from infiltration in a room heated with hydronic radiant heat because there’s little or no convective movement of air, and that’s what makes these systems so efficient. A well-designed hydronic radiant system can save quite a bit on fuel." Does this mean there is little or no air movement in an efficiently hydronic radiant heated room? Is there a way to work in a system that provides outside fresh air exchanges that will not diminish the comfort of the hydronic radiant heating? Maybe a fresh air system that is introduced at extremely low velocity at high cfm rate? So as not to disturb the effectiveness of the radiant heater?

DanHolohan

Thanks, @jeant. This podcast is about radiators in churches, operating a low temperatures:

https://heatinghelp.com/dead-men-tales/the-secret-to-heating-old-churches/

That limits convective air movement and gets close to what goes on with a radiant system.

The Milwaukee Art Museum also comes to mind. This gorgeous building is radiantly heated. When I visited there I notice the dust that had settled on the areas where the public wasn't permitted to walk. Very little convective currents going on in that soaring space.

jeant

Thanks Dan. That explains a lot. By the way I have a first edition 1948 of Clifford Strock's "Heating and Ventilation Engineering Databook". Information all still very relevant today. An old timer passed it on to me many years ago. You can still get a suntan on a windy beach.

bucksnort

This explains why my wife is cold. I thought it was just me.

DanHolohan

Mr. Strock was brilliant. My late friend Richard Koral edited that book. I miss him. 

Ironman

Excellent article.

I had a customer call me a coulpe of months ago who said he was freezing even though his house was 74*. It was a 100+ year old home with 12" solid brick walls and plaster applied directly to the brick. We see these often.

They story begins when he bought the house about 8 years ago and asked me to come look at the heating system and make recommendations. It was a nice two pipe steam system but the boiler was shot. I advised him to replace the boiler and keep the steam system for the very reason that Dan elaborates in this article. He chose not to. Instead, he tried to "green" the house by installing PV panels and a ducted heat pump system done by others.

Fast forward back to the present. He tells me the walls stay about 62* with the room at 74* and he's been cold ever since it was done. Now he wants radiant, any form, but can't afford it. He spent too much on PV panels and a heat pump.