SteamyTea

Why only 0.19 W/m².K. I thought walls had to be 0.16 W/m².K now. Is that just the starting point or a typo.

How big is this kettle, a deep bathfull.

Still the wrong way to make tea. Because plumbing is pretty unsophisticated and cannot, or will not, be designed properly. You could have a solid timber floor and get similar characteristics, but the price is prohibitive.

It is also affected by the laws of cooling, so as it gets closer to equalibrium, the time constant lengthens. But that is true for any material that is solid, fluids can behave a bit differently. Especially if they change phase, but that just means more sums. Not insurmountable to calculate.

There are loads of examples, one that narked me the other day was Caroline Lucas MP talking about "wellbeing", if she wants to be taken seriously by the world, stop using wooly, meaningless and unmeasurable terms. She said another word that had no meaning, but I can only remember my dispair and anger.

This has more to do with the thermal conductivity. Materials are odd things, their characteristics are not correlated to mass. So you cannot assume that because something is heavier, larger, more massive, denser, or whatever measure you want to associate with the count of stuff in it, that it will perform as you imagine it should. 20 seconds on Wikipedia, or Kaye and Laby, will show you that. Always worth a look.

It is the same thing after a bit of algebraic rearrangement. It is why I like it. With a bit of extension it can take shape into account.

You have to include conductivity as well. Do a dimension analysis on what you have done and you will see it does not make sense. Yes. And this is why we have confusion like this. It is not hard or difficult scientifically or mathematically, but by just giving things random names, or titles, or units, nothing can be worked out properly. You may not like the science methodology, or even understand it, but I am sure you can appreciate it when you buy things and travel, without standardisation and agreement, nothing can get done. The arguement that we have been building for thousands of years is pretty poor, where are all, not just some, of these old buildings. Estimation is a major tool in the scientist bag, we use it to establish whether something is close to correct, or total bollocks. Have a listen to this week's More or Less on radio 4, they had s great example of estimation. The real problem is that most people did not receive a good science education, and this is costing, in cash terms, billions. A quick estimation of £1bn is 15 quid for each person in the country.

I know what I call it, and it is the correct term. Thermal Inertia I (that is italicised and capitalised i) One may well catch fire, but if you limit the temperature then there is not a great deal of difference These are the figures for my experiment. Material Volume /m3 Mass /kg Density /kg.m-3 SHC kJ/kg/K Thermal Conductivity U-Value Notes I PU 0.0017 0.06 35 1.4 0.2 Boxes moved on 25/06/2018 3.143621 Timber 0.0017 0.88 518 2.3 1.8 46.29318 Concrete Brick 0.0017 3.83 2253 1 1.1 49.78188 You can see that Timber and concrete have very similar I values

One last chart to show how little difference the materials make. This one shows that the distribution of material temperatures is very close to external air temperature, even though the mass of the materials, and there thermal characteristics, are all very different. I have not looked at the probability of error, just that the slope of the lines are very similar, but I estimate that they are at the 99.99% level.

Probably. Without context and a full explanation of the experiment, they're pretty meaningless. Well the context is there. You don't really need to know it to read the charts, but for more clarity, the experiment was 3 identical translucent boxes, each with 3 identically sized blocks of different materials in them. They sit outside, in the weather, and temperature readings are taken every minute. Then the fun of creating generalised rules, via statistical analysis happens. As @JSHarrisasked, and I teased about, what is the SI unit for thermal mass? I know the answer, but without others knowing it, confusion will continue. I think the root is deeper than that. Many people assume that mass is weight, and when we have purchased things in the past, we associate weight with quality. Now there may be some truth in that for some products, but it is not true for many industries. Aviation and hiking being two extremes.

I think you have misread the charts. They show distribution, not a time series. So basically they show how often a temperature happens when the external air temperature is the 'bin'. The reason for this is that housing is not a steady state situation, temperatures, irradiation and windspeeds are constantly varying, and that is before you put in the effects of rain and evaporation. I think the problem is that most people, including me 20 years ago, assumed that mass was the governing factor. This axiom is wrong, it is the material's thermal characteristics that govern, so is a combination of volume, density, thermal conductivity, heat capacity, installed shape, exposed area and other things.

@Clive Osborne Any news on the tests yet?

I get quite excited when I see loads of insulation. Am I odd?

Does anyone get paid to find out why the cracks are happening?

OK So I have wasted 3 years at university studying this, plus ten years thinking about it, and the last 2 years testing it. Can you show me the significant difference in these two charts.

So do you think that is what really happens. If you had a fixed structure size, and a fixed window area, with the only thing changing is the mass of the building, then temperatures would be significantly different for varying weather conditions and climate regimes?

Too large to maintain temperature stability. Good question, look forward to the answers

That would be "that is it", rather than "Coke is it" then.

And there is the odd quirt that C is used for coulomb (named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb) and is an amp.second, or just to make matter even worse, a farad.volt if talking about capacitors. The sign for farad (named after Michael Faraday) is F, just to confuse with the Fahrenheit scale. Thank goodness for the ° sign (which is Alt + 248, or Alt + 0176 on a PC). Now who wants to explain ' and " with regards to time, distance and angles. And Prime Numbers, or should that be primes.

I suspect that the majority of TFs in England is the volume builders. Most small developers probably stick with block.

I made a bi stable and multi vibrator, with a couple of trans. Things were different in the 80's.

Not all, now I have to put up with millennium snowflake parents with their overly cherished offspring. There is nowhere left to be a free minded adult anymore.

They are cheap, under 3 quid. And it does give you the opportunity to do other things as well. Complication is a complex thing. My car is complicated, as are the roads, and the associated rules to use them. But they get me to the seaside and back, and I can't even now, 15 minutes after the journeys end, remember anything about it.

I think most of the 'cons' go back the Barrett Homes fiasco of the late 1980's, more than 30 years ago now. Anything that is designed and built badly is going to have problems. It does seem that brick and block is a really English thing, most of the world uses poured concrete or timber. A friend of mine, who is unfortunately American, worked for a large Architectural company, when I said the old saying 'as safe as bricks and mortar', she did not know what it meant. Or the windows are too large.