How to insulate your home and choose a heater?
In the conditions of war, on the eve of winter, you have to think about how to heat your apartment without heating and electricity. You need to take care of the insulation of your house, apartment, and entrance yourself in advance.
What role do house doors play in heat loss? What does a heat-saving film on windows do for us? How to heat an apartment without heating and electricity? Oleksiy Zhuk, an energy efficiency specialist, spoke about this.
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How to insulate a private house?
Insulation technologies have already been worked out. There are many construction companies on the Ukrainian market that work with this. The most effective way to insulate residential buildings from the outside is to use expanded polystyrene or mineral wool. It is worth noting that in order to create an insulated thermal circuit and avoid heat energy losses, the house has to be insulated from all sides: roof, windows, and the basement.
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How to insulate an apartment?
An apartment should be insulated in the same way as a private house, but there are some nuances to consider.
The first nuance is the insulation of joints or interfloor slabs so as not to create so-called cold bridges through which cold will penetrate the apartment or heat will escape from the apartment. Therefore, you need to be very thorough about this, making sure that not only the apartment is insulated, but also the joints of the interfloor slabs.
The second thing is that you need to make sure that the apartment is ventilated so that excess moisture doesn’t collect and mold doesn’t spread with it.
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Which heater is better to choose?
There are several options when it comes to choosing electric heaters:
- fan heater;
- oil heater;
- infrared heater;
- ceramic heater;
- convector type heater.
When choosing, you should take into account the area of the room to be heated or warmed. The standard consumption is 1 kW of electricity per 10 square meters. Depending on the technology used in electric heaters, this figure may vary.
Fan heaters are the least effective in this case, because they heat only when they are on. Oil heaters will provide heat for some time after they are turned off, because the oil inside the heater accumulates some heat energy.
The most effective ones are ceramic heaters, because the technology of ceramic panels provides for a greater return of thermal energy compared to the consumed electrical energy, i.e., a ceramic heater has the highest effectiveness.
Meanwhile, in private houses, heat pumps are the most effective: the correlation of electricity consumption to heat output is one to three, and therefore they are the most effective for the private sector.
