How Does Radiant Heat Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Brian with ericksontutoring.blogspot.com. Today, we're going to discuss how radiant heat works. So radiant heat is, in general, it's one type of heat or heat loss in specific. So, we're going to talk about the four different types of heat loss and then we're going to talk about how radiant heat is used to heat homes and other rooms. So first, the four different types of heat loss. We'll start with conduction. Conduction is what happens when a warm body touches a cool surface. So say you touched a cold ice pick that's been sitting out in the snow. You lose heat to that cooler surface. Something happens when you go into a cooler body of water. You lose heat to the cooler environment that you're touching. The second type of heat loss is convection. This occurs when density changes, so warm air is less dense, and it will rise. Cold air is more dense and it will settle down. So, when you have convection, usually you start to form currents and those sorts of things. A common example is a convection oven. The third type of heat loss is evaporation. This is what happens when a liquid turns to gas and a lot of energy is released. As a result of that, which leads to cooling. Sweating is a perfect example of utilizing evaporation. And last, we have radiation, which is what we're interested in. Radiation is a type of heat that's constantly given off by warm objects to the surrounding environment, so, if you put your hand above a stove after you've turned it off, it's still giving off heat to the surrounding cooler environment. So that's radiation. Now in terms of radiant heat. Heat for a house, usually you find it in a floor, and what people do is you lay out a whole bunch of pipes on the floor and then you run something through them. You can run air through them but air doesn't hold heat very well so it's not a typical solution. You can run electricity through wires. Electricity is pretty constant, but it's pretty costly, so you don't often find elec, radiant heat floors that are electrical. Your third option is some sort of liquid, often water or something else that holds heat well. Put a little bit of heat in there and if you have it in maybe a thick, concrete body, concrete floor or something like that, it gives off heat to the surrounding area and slowly radiates heat throughout the house. So you're heating the floor and the floor gives off radiant heat to the surrounding cooler environment and keeps your room warm. You can also have radiant heat panels on the walls or the ceiling, but these are less common then radiant heat floors. So this has been a brief discussion of how radiant heat and radiant heating works."