Curses! Foiled Again!

or Do Reflective Foil Barriers Really Work?

As a regular course of doing business we are often asked to help with the sizing of our radiant heating systems. In order to do that, we take into account all of the relevant data of the project in order to calculate a heat loss estimate. This estimate calculates, amongst other things, the amount of heat lost through the building’s various components to the outside. One of the fundamental pieces of data that is critical to a quality estimate is the R-value of the various building’s components. I think everyone is pretty familiar with R-value – the higher the R-value, the greater the resistance to the flow of heat to the outside. So, from a space heating perspective the higher the R-value, the slower the heat can travel through that material to the outside. Slower mean less heat lost over a given period of time. That’s a good thing and I think we all know that.

Sometimes we run across a project that has extremely high R-value claims for walls, ceilings, etc. That’s not normally an issue if the claims are true but if the claims are wrong and we used them in our estimate the heating system would be woefully undersized. We want to avoid that of course, so we check further to verify these claims.

“I’m Using a Radiant Foil Barrier!”

There’s a lot of dis-information regarding radiant foil barriers and a lot of false claims about their “effective R-value”. Please, please, please don’t you believe any of these claims when it comes to heating.

Now don’t get me wrong. There is something behind the claim, but it is almost never close to the claimed savings and invariably it won’t do anything for you in the way it’s frequently installed.

The Theory

The theory behind a radiant barrier is that its shiny face will reflect radiant heat back into the heated space. Yes, it will do that if and only if there is an air gap between the source of the radiant heat and the reflective surface. As stated quite clearly in the National Research Council of Canada’s article: In order to provide any significant thermal benefit, it must be installed in conjunction with an air space. (emphasis mine)

Think about a mirror. It’s a reflective surface and when light strikes it, that light is reflected back. But notice that there is always an air gap between the source of light and the mirror’s surface. If you were to cover the mirror, how much light will it now reflect? None, right? Exactly. Radiant heat behaves very much like visible light in that regard. If you cover up the reflective surface of the barrier with drywall (in the case of walls or ceilings) or concrete (in the case of floors) you have no reflector and therefore no benefit.

Also you may want to take note that in the same article that the reflective component (when an air gap is incorporated into the wall assembly) only accounts for about 5% of the wall’s thermal resistance. It seems to me that you’re better off spending your money where savings can be more significant – like additional insulation or sealing windows and doors.

The Hidden Costs of Mechnical Heating Systems

When evaluating a heating system, you often look at the initial capital costs, and if you can get it – running or operating costs. That’s only natural. You want to know that you can afford the system now and in the future. You’re trying to estimate the Total Cost of Ownership and that’s good. But did you know that there are other hidden costs? Costs that are very much a part of owning and operating the system but aren’t immediately apparent when assessing them? In this article I will itemize some of these very real costs that aren’t immediately apparent to the casual observer.

Floor Space Cost

This is probably the most over-looked cost of them all, and it’s a biggie! Think about it for a minute: How much does your home or building cost per square foot? $100? $125? $200? The cost of the home varies greatly on the location and the details of how it is constructed and finished. So let’s take $100 per square foot as a base line. Now most mechanical heating systems require floor space. Some units take up more space than others depending upon the unit’s design. You can also factor in not just the foot print, but the safety space all around the unit. You can’t usually store anything immediately around the unit, so that floor space is lost to you. Let’s say it’s only 20 square feet. But at only $100 per square foot, that comes to $2,000! Congratulations! You just spent $2,000 (or more) just for a place to park your heating system! If you factor in the interest cost on the mortgage for this space it really starts to add up quickly.

Wouldn’t you rather have that space available to you for more productive uses? A bigger Family Room or Rec Room, perhaps? A SmartRoom system, since it doesn’t take up floor space, allows you to maximize your investment in your home or building.

Oh… and if your building is a commercial property that you rent or lease out, think how the additional space affects your bottom line: there’s more square footage available as rentable space. That’s more revenue year after year after year.

Regular Maintenance

Mechanical system, such as heat pumps, furnaces and boilers all have parts subject to regular maintenance. The burner might need adjusting, belts replaced, fans oiled and cleaned. These aren’t normally large costs, but they do recur every year. (Or if you opt not to do these things, your system will run less efficiently.) Then there’s the inconvenience factor of having to book a day off for the technician to arrive. And that’s assuming he arrives on the day promised. At any rate, these costs do add up over the life of the system and you’ll want to include them when assessing your options.

Replacement Parts

I’ve given Replacement Parts their own category as it is a separate issue from Regular Maintenance. These are usually bigger ticket items and are required to be purchased after the warranty runs out. They include pumps, compressors, fans, burners, etc. They’re infrequent (usually) but they can be costly. A new heat exchanger doesn’t come cheap, nor does the labor costs to diagnose and replace it. Watch those warranties carefully – sometimes you’ll hear a number quoted but you need to dig deeper. Does it cover the whole system or just certain parts of the system – like the casing, but not the burner, compressor or pumps. I’ve run across systems that would only guarantee the pump for 90 days! That’s a critical component. If a manufacturer isn’t going to back up his product, what are you really getting?

Single Point of Failure

Remember too, that most mechanical systems (especially in residences) are an all-or-nothing deal. There’s no redundancy. You have to create your own backup plan such as a wood-burning stove or the like. If your furnace or heat pump fails it usually affects the whole building. In larger commercial buildings, they’ll often look at redundant systems each often sized for a share of the total load. Should one fail, at least there’s a backup they can use or switch around from area to area. This only gives them 1/2 capacity, but 1/2 is better than nothing, right? But if you only have the single unit, you’re subject to 100% loss of the system. You don’t want that.

We spoke recently with an owner of a heat pump. He mentioned that although his heat pump was less than 5 years old, his compressor failed which required new parts. He had been waiting several days at that point for the parts. Meanwhile he had no functional system. If this happens during the dead of winter you’re going to be scrambling for a backup system (multiple space heaters or whatever you can get your hands on) to prevent a catastrophe such as freezing pipes. Incidentally, while this owner’s parts were covered under warranty, the service call wasn’t, so he was going to have to fork out a sizable service fee, plus take a 1/2 day off work to allow the technician in to do the job. That’s a cost he never calculated in his original assessment. You should.

SmartRoom systems are different. There is generally no Single Point of Failure. (Actually, it’s quite rare for any failure at all – there are no moving parts to wear out.) A SmartRoom system generally comprises of several panels per zone. And several zones per home or building. Should a panel fail (normally it would have to be damaged somehow for that to happen), there are other panels within that zone to take up the slack. Should the zone fail (and really, the only way that could happen is if the wiring was cut, a thermostat failed or a circuit breaker failed – all easy repairs with readily available parts) it would only affect that zone. A single room. The rest of the house or building is unaffected.

Insurance Premiums

Insurance companies base their premiums on the perceived risks involved. Electrically operated heating systems (and especially SmartRooms) are generally considered to be safer sources of heat. Gas and oil systems are riskier. Gas is explosive and can do incredible damage to your home or building and to your neighbors’ homes and buildings. A quick Google for “natural gas explosions” will reveal just how frequent an occurrence it really is. On top of the explosion risk, natural gas is poisonous. That’s why it’s a good thing to have a detectors installed (at additional cost).

Both oil and gas systems can leak carbon monoxide into your home or building. It’s created by the burning of the fuel. Most of it is supposed to be exhausted out of a chimney or vent (and there’s still a risk that it can be drawn back into the house anyway). If, however, there’s a crack in the seals this orderless and colorless poison can leak into your home or building. You can’t detect it without additional equipment. But it can be fatal. You can find out more about this here.

Oil has similar problems.

Oil also has a storage problem. We’re seeing it more and more. In some jurisdictions you are no longer permitted to store an oil tank outside. Should it leak, the oil seeps into the ground and has to be cleaned up using expensive methods. We’ve heard of a case where such a leak cost the homeowner $45,000! So these jurisdictions are requiring, by code, that the storage tank be installed inside the home (taking up yet more of your valuable floor space). If the oil leaks, it’s safely contained in your home. How nice! On top of that, these same jurisdictions often require a specially constructed room designed to contain the oil and furnace. Again, another hidden cost. While this may make perfectly good sense to the bureaucrats implementing these policies, you’re the one that has to foot the bill. Is this really what you want? Are you even aware of these issues when you’re making your choice?

Of course, not all jurisdictions have these regulations in place. But more and more are contemplating them from what I can see. At least that seems to be the trend.

Those are some of the risks. Your insurance company knows them and factors them into your premium or writes in a clause that excludes these issues from coverage. Each insurance company is different. Some do offer lower premiums if you have a safer system. Some don’t. But unless you know to look, you’ll never know about it.

Summary

I’ve highlighted just a few of the major hidden costs associated with mechanical systems. Many of them are pretty obvious once you think about it for a bit. A SmartRoom system isn’t subject to these kinds of costs. For the record, my own home, outfitted with SmartRooms products, has had a total of zero maintenance costs over the 5 years it’s been installed. I just set the temperature and forget about it. Isn’t this what you want in a heating system?

Are Heat Pumps Smart and Do They Save You Money?

There’s certainly a lot of noise and promotion going on about heat pumps (and in particular Ground Source Heat Pumps). I’m sure that anyone who has to make a decision on a heating source for their home or building has run across them.

There’s lots of noise, but how much is real hard information that helps you make a proper decision? Not a lot, I’d bet.

The main promotional noise generally focuses on energy efficiency. Energy efficiency is good. Why use more energy than you need to? That’s wasteful and probably will cost you more than you need to pay in operating costs. And who doesn’t want to save money? Afterall, you’ll have to live with (and pay for) your choice for years to come.

A very good way of evaluating the value of alternatives is to look at simple payback. Will the additional cost premium that you have to pay now pay for itself in the future? Basically this method tells you at what point down the road the additional investment will start paying back. If it doesn’t have a payback return, or the return is too far out, then it’s not a good investment.

For instance, in a recent project I was working on, a customer was considering a SmartRooms system vs a Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP). This is a residential project – a single family home in a cold climate. The GSHP came in at a premium of $22,000 more expensive than the SmartRooms system. Right then and there he knew that it was outside his budget so it wasn’t a viable option for him. But would it have saved him money in the long run? Lets have a look at some numbers:

At $22,000 extra (bundled into his mortgage at, say, 5%) his first year’s financing cost is going to be $1,100 in additional interest. Now the interest costs will slowly drop over the years as he pays down his mortgage but the picture is clear: at the very minimum the GSHP must save at least $1,100 over the alternative just to pay the additional interest! That’s a pretty tall order.

Ok. Let’s get back to the energy savings. When speaking with the GSHP people, they’ll be quoting all kinds of acronyms at you: COP and SEER, etc. The gist of their claims is that these numbers prove that they’re energy efficient and that for every watt of energy you put into the heat pump, you get X number of heating watts out. A heat pump with a COP of 3.5 means that theoretically for every watt of energy consumed you get 3.5 watts of heat out. Great! Free Heat! Yay! Um, no. That’s only a very small part of the full story. The truth is that these numbers are established in the lab under specific conditions. This topic itself is deserving of further examination and I will write about it in the future. For the time being, though, you should be aware that a heat pump’s efficiency is not static – it greatly depends on the temperature rise. The greater the rise, the lower the efficiency. In other words the colder it gets (just when you need the heat the most!) the less efficient the heat pump becomes. How inefficient? I don’t know. Manufacturers don’t or won’t publish these numbers. (Or at least I haven’t found them yet – if anyone cares to point me to such data, I’d love to see it.) What you really need to know is: what is the average – not theoretical Best Case Scenario – efficiency you can expect during the heating season? Knowing this helps you make an educated decision that is right for you. Maybe that’s why they won’t publish the information.

Moving on… ok, let’s assume for a minute that their published figures are correct for the whole heating season. How do the numbers look now? Do they even approach a break-even point?

In this particular project, I estimated that the annual energy cost to heat this (admittedly large) house, in a cold climate would be around $2,000. (That’s a pretty safe figure, by the way – SmartRooms generally performs better than my estimates because I do take into consideration reasonable real-world scenarios.)

Since we already know that we’re paying an additional $1,100 in interest, the heat pump must heat the home for a full year for $900 or less (2000 – 1100 = 900) and that’s before we take into consideration the maintenance costs, the blower costs, etc. before it can stack up against a SmartRooms system. I don’t know any manufacturer willing to make that claim.

So, what to do?

You need to know, that like a car, there is the cost to buy, the cost to operate and the cost to maintain. SmartRooms systems make part of the decision easy because we have no maintenance costs. The capital costs are quoted so that’s easy to understand.

It’s the operating costs that get fuzzy. If a contractor talks techno with huge savings, well if it’s too good to be true it likely is. Then call the manufacturer directly. SmartRooms makes this easy by giving you a calculated operating cost in writing using your local electrical rates based on your home or project. We use standard accepted calculations that are quite conservative. There’s no surprises here. With 25 years of experience we know these costs to be quite representative. We even recommend you ask the heat pump guys to give you an operating cost – but I doubt they will. Then you can make a truly informed decision for what is best for you.