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How does Insulation Save you Money?
Left to its own devices, warm air will naturally move to cooler spaces. This means that without insulation, the warm air from inside your home will escape to the outdoors, only to be replaced with cooler air.
Insulation works to help homeowners maintain the warmth of their home and reduce energy costs by slowing the movement of heat from a hot space to one that is cooler.
There are three ways that heat transfers from one space to another. These three ways are radiation, conduction, and convection. Let’s look at each:
Radiation is the transfer of heat with electromagnetic light waves. You are not able to see these waves, but you can feel radiant heat. Radiant heat can be felt when standing next to a hot fire or under the warm rays of the sun.
Conduction heat is transferred when heat moves through an object. The heat exchange occurs at a molecular level and the amount of heat transfer depends on the material with which the object is made. For example, metal conducts heat better than plastic.
Convection is a heat transfer that occurs between an object and the air or a fluid. For example, some furnaces use convection heat and warm air by forcing it past a heated element.
Slowing each of these transfers of heat is the role of insulation. Insulation does this by creating a barrier between the warm air inside your home and the cool air outside of your home.
This barrier reduces the amount of heat that your home’s warm air will lose by limiting the contact that it has with the cooler outside air. By keeping the air inside your home warmer for longer, insulation reduces the amount of work that your home heating system must do and therefore reduces your energy costs.
Of course, insulation does not just work in the winter to keep your home warm, it also works in the summer to keep your home cool. This same principle of slowing the exchange of heat operates in reverse in the summer. During warmer months, insulation limits the contact that your cool home air has with the warm outside air, thus keeping the inside temperature of your home cooler.
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