With the bearing heat and the hot weather becoming seemingly hotter during summer, you may be wondering how best to keep your home office nice and cool. To tackle this, one needs to understand how the house may heat up. Heat typically enters the house through excessive heating of your house’s walls and through the windows.This occurs in a process of heat transfer known as convection as well as conduction. Convection deals with the transfer of heat through fluids (such as gases and liquids); conduction can be described as the transfer of heat through solids. What then happens is that heat moves outside the house via convection (in the air) and then meets the windows; conduction then takes place as the heat is transferred from the air into the solid window’s material through conduction. The difference in temperature then means that the heat transfers from the outer side of the window to the inner side. The heat is then transferred to the colder inside air through convection.
It follows then that we should find ways to counteract this. The main focus of this article will be how heat travels through windows and possible remedies.
With a focus on windows, one often overlooked factor when it comes to dispersing heat within the house during cold periods is the presence (or alternatively, the absence) of roller shutters. Roller shutters can help you quite a lot when it comes to keeping the house cool during those dread awful hot periods and so they may be worth your time.
Roller shutters may be considered as types of doors that consist of multiple stacked horizontal slats that are used to cover doors, large store windows or the typical house windows. They are usually made from a relatively sturdy metal such as aluminium or some other alloy depending on the manufacturer.
The amount of heat transferred is predicated on two main factors: the area of your window as well as the structural build of your window.
The amount of heat transferred is directly proportional to the total area of windows within the house. The larger the surface area, the more heat transferred. The science behind this is that since a larger window offers a larger surface area, there is more area for conduction to take place and thus more heat is transferred. The most intuitive way to think of this is by picturing heat as waves. If the waves are being directed to a small surface, then less heat is transferred since not all the waves can access the surface at the same time. If there is a larger surface, then the heat waves can easily access the surface and thus more heat transfer can occur.
The other factor would be the structural build of the window. If your window is the standard thin window, then heat transfer will occur much faster. The most intuitive way of thinking about this is by examining the ‘distance’ the heat will take to travel through the window. Examining the window from a longitudinal cross – section, a thin window means that the window is quite thin. What this means is that the heat will have to cover a relatively shorter distance to be transferred and as a whole will lead to heat transfer much faster.
One way of dealing with this is by installing roller shutters. Whether on the inner side or the outer side(which would arguably lead to less heat transfer), roller shutters impact these two heat – transfer factors favourably. By adding roller shutters, you effectively add an additional barrier for the heat to have to pass through to be transferred into the house. This means that more heat is left outside the house. Another factor is the material used in the roller shutters. As stated, some roller shutters are made from complex alloys or polycarbonate materials. What this is implies is that they are poor conductors of heat. As the name states, poor conductors of heat (or alternatively, insulators/insulating materials) are materials in which heat cannot easily transfer. This would mean that the heat would get trapped at the surface (or near the surface) and fail to conduct all the way through. This would lead to a layer of heat forming at the surface of the roller shutter. At some point the temperature of the roller shutter itself would match that of the outside air and consequently, heat transfer would stop.
There is always the option to just use your air conditioner, but this has the caveat of increasing your energy bills drastically. Another thing to consider is that the AC is probably going to be a recurrent expense that will contribute to your monthly bills. It may make more economic sense to invest in roller shutters which are one – time costs that do not require any power.
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