Good afternoon, dear guests!
Does the insulation warm? It would seem an absurd question, but an experienced builder will say - no, insulation cannot heat!
A routine test, wrap the thermometer in insulation and look at its readings after an hour, two, three. You will make sure that it does not heat up a single degree!
The fact is that such materials are not heat sources. Insulation, like a fur coat, dressed in frost - is designed only to keep warm. Touching a high-quality insulation, you will certainly feel warmth, but this is the reflected heat of your body, and not the heat emitted by the material. Many people do not understand this, using roll insulation, expanded polystyrene or polystyrene where possible and where not.
In full confidence I will say that if there is no heat source, then no insulation will save and any structure sooner or later freezes. It's like a thermos left in the cold - it will soon cease to retain the heat that the cooling water emits. As a result, the water in the thermos turns into ice!
In other words, the insulation helps the house to warm itself, just like a fur coat helps the body to warm itself, period. They work exclusively with a positive temperature radiation source.
Now about the absurdity of using heaters
1. Insulation inside the structure
- Let's insulate your house from the inside?
- At home, do whatever you want, just answer the question: will it be warmer for you if you swallow a fur coat?
By insulating the room from the inside, we reduce the durability of the wall, which does not get warmer from such use, but freezes even more due to the accumulation of moisture. As a result, the heat goes away, and the dampness is getting closer and hello to condensation with further destruction of the finish.
2. Insulation of a part of the structure
- Let's insulate the monolithic belt so that the concrete does not freeze?
- Why do you wear the whole fur coat as a whole, put on only the sleeve!
Warming is a complex of measures. As we know, when insulating a house, the seams of the insulation plates themselves are always minimized, while the plates must fit snugly to the structure and cover as much as possible the entire area of the building adjacent to the street.
Cold spreads along the path of least resistance and partial insulation never saves the situation, which will be clear from the picture above.
The blue arrow indicates that the cold bypasses the insulation along the shortest path without any obstacles, the structure will still accept the cold.
Many can say that the insulation between the concrete products and the cladding removes the cold bridge. Yes, it does! But only locally, and insulation is a whole range of measures aimed at energy saving and maintaining the integrity of structures. By removing the problem locally, we do not solve the problem globally.
3. Insulation of foundations
It is important to understand what we are pursuing when insulating the foundation. If we have a basement floor, then most likely the node supporting the foundation on the ground is below marks of freezing of the soil and insulation we need only in order to save a penny on heating basement.
If we do not have a basement, then several types of foundations are being erected here, including shallow and deep foundations.
If the foundation is shallow, then the node of its support on the base is located in the zone of freezing of the soil, so here you need to insulate both the foundation itself and the soil under it.
Just to prevent heaving, by means of insulation under the blind area of the house - we keep heat from the heated house itself and partly from the ground. Many people make an additional layer (highlighted in green) as a safety net.
With deep foundations, we do not need to insulate the soil. In houses without a basement, insulation is applied according to the weather conditions of the region. In warm climates, where in winter there are only short-term frosts - for the most part, the foundations do not need insulation, but only their waterproofing is performed. In cold climates - even if the foundation is deep - it is insulated to prevent freezing of the underground through the concrete, and accordingly, to avoid fungus and mold at the base of the floor.
4. Porch
I have repeatedly written that a porch on a shallow foundation almost always moves away from the house, especially in regions where frosts persist for a long time. In the south, you might get lucky! Why is this so? The porch as such is not a source of heat, if the house is heated inside, then there is no porch, therefore - what will be a layer of insulation or that it will not be - does not matter at all. As I said above, the water in the thermos will inevitably freeze, so here too - the ground under the shallow foundation of the porch - WILL FREEZE, despite the installed insulation! Its properties are simply not enough to maintain a positive earth temperature at an outdoor temperature of even -15 ..- 17 ° C.
Therefore, experienced builders recommend making a deep foundation under the porch!
5. Insulation of communications
I often see how, when laying various kinds of communications in the zone of freezing soil, they irresponsibly approach the issue insulation and do not use tubular insulation, but lay the cut extruded polystyrene foam in one row on top pipes:
Agree that it is not difficult to bypass the insulation along the shortest path in freezing temperatures.
I really hope that the article was useful and interesting to you. Thanks for attention!
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