nexgen graphene heating panels

[Jeremy Harris]

10 hours ago, Clive Osborne said:

I have and will post in when i am in the office.Remeber i have said wavelength changes with temperature. Also not being rude I have said that many times its FIR and Temperature needs to be right. We have some very expensive test equipment  to hire and an expert to use it coming soon. The purpose of this is to measure exactly the difference. We use FLIR cameras all the time but at our price level tolerances are as not great as it could be . Let me post independent test results as promised. Then we can comeback to this.

 

OK, I'll wait to review your evidence.  I hope that it's been properly peer reviewed, as it needs to in order to be compared fairly with the published data.  I don't doubt that you have expensive test equipment, I used to be head of the RCS and IR measurement facilities at what was then the Defence Research and Evaluation Agency Funtington Range, (now run by Qinetic, before that it was a part of the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment).  The IR measurement equipment we had cost a few £M, and was primarily used to measure IR signatures of ships and aircraft, in order to research ways to reduce them.  Just maintaining the cryogenic bolometers used in the sensors cost a fair bit. 

 

FLIR room temperature sensors are sort of OK for non-critical comparative analysis, but they are, like all IR imaging devices, highly dependent on the surface emissivity of the object being measured, so they will only give accurate results when their image output is adjusted for the specific emissivity of the various surfaces they are looking at.  This requires emissivity measurements to be made of the surfaces, so that the required adjustments can be made when post-processing the data.   Fluke have a short, non-technical, user guide that covers emissivity and the issues it can cause with thermal imaging fairly well: 2563251_6251_ENG_B_W.PDF

[Clive Osborne]

9 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Scratching my head a bit here.

That works out at 60W/m^-2

I heat my house with 12W.m^-2

 

I think you may be getting installed capacity and mean power delivery a bit muddled.

This also seems a bit odd and adds to my suspicions.

 

Well not all houses are  insulated the same.  We test in a room that has no insulation at all. This is pretty basic stuff . I'm not going to post about calculating heat loss . It's also on our site about watts per Sq. Meter . I assume your house is passive or you never take your coat off

[Clive Osborne]

48 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 

OK, I'll wait to review your evidence.  I hope that it's been properly peer reviewed, as it needs to in order to be compared fairly with the published data.  I don't doubt that you have expensive test equipment, I used to be the officer in charge of the RCS and IR measurement facilities at what was then the Defence Research and Evaluation Agency Funtington Range, (now run by Qinetic, before that it was a part of the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment).  The IR measurement equipment we had cost a few £M, and was primarily used to measure IR signatures of ships and aircraft, in order to research ways to reduce them.  Just maintaining the cryogenic bolometers used in the sensors cost a fair bit. 

 

FLIR room temperature sensors are sort of OK for non-critical comparative analysis, but they are, like all IR imaging devices, highly dependent on the surface emissivity of the object being measured, so they will only give accurate results when their image output is adjusted for the specific emissivity of the various surfaces they are looking at.  This requires emissivity measurements to be made of the surfaces, so that the required adjustments can be made when post-processing the data.   Fluke have a short, non-technical, user guide that covers emissivity and the issues it can cause with thermal imaging fairly well: 2563251_6251_ENG_B_W.PDF

Did you actually read my post at all ? We are talking about how much FIR we get into the room. I clearly said we dont have the equipment to measure that correctly we know we get far more than a FIR panel. We are getting a specialist to do it. Many years ago I used an AVO meter for measuring resistance. I dont now. We are well versed on FIR. You should talk to my Tech Director. You guys wouldn't leave the room for a week. Now please let me go away and do what I said I will regarding test results. That's not an unreasonable request. I did not see anyone from F****r come on here and stand up for their product when negative things were posted 

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, Clive Osborne said:

I assume your house is passive or you never take your coat off

No, pretty standard 1987 timber frame.

Temperature is kept at a steady 20°C, plus or minus a degree.  Heated by a couple of storage heaters (from 1987).

3 minutes ago, Clive Osborne said:

We test in a room that has no insulation at all

It must have some, even a cardboard box has insulating properties.

It would not be hard to set up a room for testing and comparing different heating systems.

Just a case of putting in all the kit.  would cost a bit, but that is the nature of developing new products.

For two winters I experimented with just heating the house with a 1 kW fan heater rather than the storage heaters.  It worked just as well, used the same amount of energy, but cost more as I was using E7 and running the fan heater during the day.  I did this to see if it was worth me changing my heating system.  Decided it wasn't.  That is the beauty of data collection.  It is easy and cheap to collect electrical power and temperature data these days.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

1 minute ago, Clive Osborne said:

Did you actually read my post at all ? We are talking about how much FIR we get into the room. I clearly said we dont have the equipment to measure that correctly we know we get far more than a FIR panel. We are getting a specialist to do it. Many years ago I used an AVO meter for measuring resistance. I dont now. We are well versed on FIR. You should talk to my Tech Director. You guys wouldn't leave the room for a week. Now please let me go away and do what I said I will regarding test results. That's not an unreasonable request. I did not see anyone from F****r come on here and stand up for their product when negative things were posted 

 

 

Yes I did, which is exactly why I wrote this first sentence, that you have quoted:

Quote

OK, I'll wait to review your evidence.

 

[scottishjohn]

13 hours ago, Clive Osborne said:

I have never said it's better than mains gas. I have never sold a ASHP to anyone on mains gas or Nexgen on the basis of saving money. But the future is electric and we can have a 1.2 sq meter using the full benefits of FIR no screed and around 100 watts a sq meter. More efficient than heating air 

thank you --then you have answered my question 

It is not a system that you would design a house around when starting form green field site ,that is enough for me ,

The man who is making  it would not use it as primary heat source in a new house if mains gas was available --the usual energy source for comparison on any system 

so no matter the current discussion on output etc ,etc - its no use to me if it not better in any tangible way  but may have uses in retro fit applications 

I don,t think anyone is slagging the actual product , but it is the real world application +costings when compared to other systems

Edited July 14, 2019 by scottishjohn

[Clive Osborne]

3 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

thank you --then you have answered my question 

It is not a system that you would design a house around when starting form green field site ,that is enough for me ,

man who is making  it would not use it as primary heat source in a new house 

so no matter the current discussion on output etc ,etc - its no use to me if it not better in any tangible way  but may have uses in retro fit applications 

Well there is a lot of off gas grid properties being built and I still believe for well insulated new homes we make a good case in comparison to heating air. Garden offices etc. We actually sold more in Holland than the UK last year. But I will never say it's cheaper to run than mains gas. Unless its convection and no zoning and a very old gas boiler then we can make a case taking maintaince and servicing into account. Some people are paying £10 to £20 a month for maintenance contracts on gas boilers. Then of course there is the green credentials and the fact no more gas boilers will be fitted in new homes from 2025 in the UK. For other parts of Europe sooner. Hopefully more people will buy PV. But this government do not want it. They are increasing VAT on solar and battery installs from 5% to 20% , gas boilers still 5%. They have a green tax on electric of 17% on gas 1.8%. They base the CO2 emissions on electric from years ago when we burnt much more coal.I have had meetings in Westminster in the housing ministry and they take advice from "experts" who have vested interests. 

[Clive Osborne]

Interesting article regarding temp and wavelength along with absorption into body. 

 

nihms426504.pdf

[ProDave]

35 minutes ago, Clive Osborne said:

Well there is a lot of off gas grid properties being built and I still believe for well insulated new homes we make a good case in comparison to heating air. 

 

Ours is perhaps typical of a lot of the houses people on here are building.  Insulation and air tightness pretty much to passive house levels although not certified as such. Very low heating power requirements.

 

With this house, and your system if I am understanding it, you pretty much have the heating panels on all the time the occupants need warmth.  So although you are not trying to heat the building fabric, I think with the very low heating required in our house you would not be able to avoid heating the fabric of the house.  So I can't see any advantage in our case.

[Jeremy Harris]

51 minutes ago, Clive Osborne said:

Interesting article regarding temp and wavelength along with absorption into body. 

 

nihms426504.pdf 1.65 MB · 2 downloads

 

 

Interesting paper, and it seems to support the suggestion I made earlier in this thread, based on the evidence from the other paper I linked to, that long wavelength IR (IR-C) doesn't penetrate beyond a few µ into the epidermis, but gets absorbed and heat is then conducted more deeply into underlying tissues.  This fits with the popular view that applying heat locally to the body can alleviate aches and pains (certainly my mother felt that using one of the pig lamps eased her pain from arthritis).

 

Edited to add:

 

This graphic seems useful in illustrating the depth of skin penetration of wavelengths from UV-C through to IR-C:

 

Edited July 14, 2019 by JSHarris
Added graphic

[Jeremy Harris]

35 minutes ago, ProDave said:

With this house, and your system if I am understanding it, you pretty much have the heating panels on all the time the occupants need warmth.  So although you are not trying to heat the building fabric, I think with the very low heating required in our house you would not be able to avoid heating the fabric of the house.  So I can't see any advantage in our case.

 

Yes, the first law of thermodynamics applies, and it is physically impossible to prevent a primarily radiant heating system inside a house from not heating up the whole of the house until a state of thermal equilibrium is reached.  This is exactly the same as for any other heating system, where all the internal surface temperatures will end up being heated, directly or indirectly, by whatever heating system is used, until the point is reached where the rate of heat input to any surface exactly matches the rate of heat loss from that surface.

 

It's worth noting that wet under floor heating is primarily a long wavelength (IR-C) radiant heating method, as only a relatively small proportion of the heat transfer to the room is from wet UFH is by conduction/convection.

 

The rate of heat loss from external walls, roof and floors will be governed largely by the thermal conductivity of those fabric elements.  The rate of heat loss from internal surfaces will usually be smaller, and governed primarily by ventilation loss (the loss mechanism is from conduction from the surface to the air, and then convection away from the surface by air movement). 

 

For a house with a low ventilation heat loss (pretty much any house that is fairly airtight and has MVHR, as the majority of those here are building) then the heat loss rate from wholly internal surfaces and objects will be pretty small, so they will all end up at a temperature very close to the air temperature.  Measurements I've made in our own house show that the walls, ceilings, and furniture all tends to be within about 0.2°C of the room air temperature.  The floor is usually around 0.5°C to 0.8°C warmer than the rest of the internal surfaces, because of the UFH (during the heating season).

[SteamyTea]

Purely as an academic exercise, has anyone every rigged one of these up to a RPi:

https://www.melexis.com/en/product/MLX90615/Digital-Plug-Play-Infrared-Thermometer-Ultra-Small-TO-Can#

They do a few different ones, including an IC² one for about 3 quid.

 

[Clive Osborne]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

 

Ours is perhaps typical of a lot of the houses people on here are building.  Insulation and air tightness pretty much to passive house levels although not certified as such. Very low heating power requirements.

 

With this house, and your system if I am understanding it, you pretty much have the heating panels on all the time the occupants need warmth.  So although you are not trying to heat the building fabric, I think with the very low heating required in our house you would not be able to avoid heating the fabric of the house.  So I can't see any advantage in our case.

Would depend on heat loss. Heat goes from hot to cold so from a air temp point of view it would go off due to stat temp . We are of course objects as well. Also its FIR wavelength/ temperature and in our case emitter size. Depends on wall , floor or ceiling fitting and what is covering the film. No need to leave it on constantly. 

[Jeremy Harris]

8 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Purely as an academic exercise, has anyone every rigged one of these up to a RPi:

https://www.melexis.com/en/product/MLX90615/Digital-Plug-Play-Infrared-Thermometer-Ultra-Small-TO-Can#

They do a few different ones, including an IC² one for about 3 quid.

 

 

I've got a box of various  Melexis IR sensors around somewhere.  Can't recall which ones offhand, but I can try and dig them out and check.  I used them to make an aircraft artificial horizon, by sensing the boundary between the ground and the sky.  Not exactly 100% successful as a project, but good fun.  It semi-worked, but the idea was to try and build a cheap and cheerful gadget that would allow the pilot of an aircraft without IFR instruments to be able to get out of trouble if he/she accidentally flew into cloud.

[Clive Osborne]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

Interesting paper, and it seems to support the suggestion I made earlier in this thread, based on the evidence from the other paper I linked to, that long wavelength IR (IR-C) doesn't penetrate beyond a few µ into the epidermis, but gets absorbed and heat is then conducted more deeply into underlying tissues.  This fits with the popular view that applying heat locally to the body can alleviate aches and pains (certainly my mother felt that using one of the pig lamps eased her pain from arthritis).

 

Edited to add:

 

This graphic seems useful in illustrating the depth of skin penetration of wavelengths from UV-C through to IR-C:

 

Did you read the medical part ? As I said I use FIR not near or mid for pain relief. Benefits vary by temperature.You saw the wavelength v temperature graph ? This is why we promote the FIR benefit . I have actually read on some companies sites it cures all sorts of ailments. Even some types of cancer. This does nothing to promote our product of course. It makes our case much more difficult. Its very frustrating 

[Jeremy Harris]

6 minutes ago, Clive Osborne said:

Did you read the medical part ? As I said I use FIR not near or mid for pain relief. Benefits vary by temperature.You saw the wavelength v temperature graph ? This is why we promote the FIR benefit . I have actually read on some companies sites it cures all sorts of ailments. Even some types of cancer. This does nothing to promote our product of course. It makes our case much more difficult. Its very frustrating 

 

 

Yes, I did.  What you refer to as FIR is the same as IR-C.  What seems to be very clear is that IR-C only penetrates as far as a few µ into the epidermis, where it then gets conducted as heat into the underlying tissue.  The effect is going to be pretty much exactly the same as applying a hot compress or similar, and we know that this can work well for some types of pain relief.

 

As for claims about cures for ailments and illnesses them I'm nowhere near qualified to judge.  What I have seen a great deal of are unsubstantiated reports of many apparent cures, which when tested properly are nothing of the sort.  Damned hard to test medical treatments, though, as the placebo effect is often as powerful, perhaps even more powerful, than many accepted treatments.

[Clive Osborne]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

 

Yes, the first law of thermodynamics applies, and it is physically impossible to prevent a primarily radiant heating system inside a house from not heating up the whole of the house until a state of thermal equilibrium is reached.  This is exactly the same as for any other heating system, where all the internal surface temperatures will end up being heated, directly or indirectly, by whatever heating system is used, until the point is reached where the rate of heat input to any surface exactly matches the rate of heat loss from that surface.

 

It's worth noting that wet under floor heating is primarily a long wavelength (IR-C) radiant heating method, as only a relatively small proportion of the heat transfer to the room is from wet UFH is by conduction/convection.

 

The rate of heat loss from external walls, roof and floors will be governed largely by the thermal conductivity of those fabric elements.  The rate of heat loss from internal surfaces will usually be smaller, and governed primarily by ventilation loss (the loss mechanism is from conduction from the surface to the air, and then convection away from the surface by air movement). 

 

For a house with a low ventilation heat loss (pretty much any house that is fairly airtight and has MVHR, as the majority of those here are building) then the heat loss rate from wholly internal surfaces and objects will be pretty small, so they will all end up at a temperature very close to the air temperature.  Measurements I've made in our own house show that the walls, ceilings, and furniture all tends to be within about 0.2°C of the room air temperature.  The floor is usually around 0.5°C to 0.8°C warmer than the rest of the internal surfaces, because of the UFH (during the heating season).

The fact you have to heat water first by a boiler would overall make it less radiant. Also please remember comfort is a personal thing. 

[SteamyTea]

13 minutes ago, Clive Osborne said:

The fact you have to heat water first by a boiler would overall make it less radiant

There is a little truth in that, and it does depend on what sort of boiler is used.

Water is easy to move about though, easier than air if you want control.

13 minutes ago, Clive Osborne said:

Also please remember comfort is a personal thing. 

This is a big problem.  I am not so bothered about temperature per sec, but I hate draughts, unless they are warm ones.

I grew up in the Far East, so got used to hot and very humid, then had a spell in Holland and Essex, so cold and dry.

Then France and West Indies, so used to hot dry winds, and much prefer them.

One of the best places to judge comfort temperature is workplaces, there are a few studies on these.  The big advantage of studying in the workplace is that people are already mentally occupied with work and productivity is easy to measure.

Though there have been some bad studies, on on light levels springs to mind.  Because of this we have highly illuminated offices and badly illuminated factories.

Edited July 14, 2019 by SteamyTea

[Jeremy Harris]

15 minutes ago, Clive Osborne said:

The fact you have to heat water first by a boiler would overall make it less radiant. Also please remember comfort is a personal thing. 

 

 

Not sure I understand what you're trying to say here.  How can anything become "less radiant" by being heated?  Water in a closed pipe system cannot radiate heat at all, all it can do is conduct heat to the walls of the pipes or whatever it is contained within. 

 

In the case of a wet underfloor heating system, those water-heated pipes can then conduct heat into the sub-floor.  In our case the UFH pipes are set into the floor concrete slab, so they conduct heat into that slab.  In turn, the surfaces of the slab conduct heat into their surroundings, with the majority of the heat moving upwards into the floor covering.  Radiation starts at the interface between the floor covering and the air in the room, with the wavelength being largely determined by the surface temperature (in accordance with Planck's Law and Wein's Displacement Law) and the amount of heat radiated determined by the differential temperature between the surface and its surroundings, together with the surface emissivity.

 

As I mentioned earlier, I agree that comfort is a personal thing.  In a previous reply I mentioned this with regard to the reduced emissivity of 3G windows, when compared to 2G ones, an effect that seems largely related to the way our skin can sense the reduced radiated heat loss when surrounding services are at an apparently higher surface temperature.

[SteamyTea]

22 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Can't recall which ones offhand, but I can try and dig them out and check

If you could and see if they work with an RPi, I then may get some as part of my Silly Sunday Experiment, which is now over a year old.

[Jeremy Harris]

7 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

If you could and see if they work with an RPi, I then may get some as part of my Silly Sunday Experiment, which is now over a year old.

 

Just dug the box out.  Seems I have a handful of Melexis 90247 sensors: Melexis MLX90247_v2.pdf

 

Looking back it seems that I used an INA122 low noise instrumentation amplifier to get a large enough signal to feed into a microcontroller A/D input: INA122.pdf

 

Not sure if one of these would be any use to you.  I may well have a spare INA122 knocking around too.

 

I found the circuit that I drew up years ago of my prototype "wing's level" IR sensor unit too:

 

[SteamyTea]

8 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Just dug the box out. 

I may just take a chance and get the ones that work on an Arduino, can get a couple of them delivered for under a tenner.

Cheers anyway.

[Clive Osborne]

12 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

No, pretty standard 1987 timber frame.

Temperature is kept at a steady 20°C, plus or minus a degree.  Heated by a couple of storage heaters (from 1987).

It must have some, even a cardboard box has insulating properties.

It would not be hard to set up a room for testing and comparing different heating systems.

Just a case of putting in all the kit.  would cost a bit, but that is the nature of developing new products.

For two winters I experimented with just heating the house with a 1 kW fan heater rather than the storage heaters.  It worked just as well, used the same amount of energy, but cost more as I was using E7 and running the fan heater during the day.  I did this to see if it was worth me changing my heating system.  Decided it wasn't.  That is the beauty of data collection.  It is easy and cheap to collect electrical power and temperature data these days.

 

Sorry but the 12 w psm makes no sense to me at all . If you have found a way to keep a 1987 build heated at that power I would like to know what tech you are using.  I just cant see this being the case. I am @JSHarris can elaborate much better than I can

 

[SteamyTea]

13 minutes ago, Clive Osborne said:

Sorry but the 12 w psm makes no sense to me at all

Small, terraced house, fairly airthtight, mild climate in Cornwall.

The technology is just old Creda storage heaters, but I do limit the E7 window to the last 4 hours.  The heaters are generally fully charged after 3 hours.

So that is 4.5 kW x 3 hours = 13.5 kWh.day^-1

13.5 kWh.day^-1 / 48 m² = 0.28 kWh.m^-2.day^-1

0.28 kWh.m^-2.day^-1 / 24 hours = 0.0117 kW.m^-2

0.0117 kW.m^-2 / 1000 = 12 W.

Edited July 14, 2019 by SteamyTea

[Clive Osborne]

47 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Small, terraced house, fairly airthtight, mild climate in Cornwall.

The technology is just old Creda storage heaters, but I do limit the E7 window to the last 4 hours.  The heaters are generally fully charged after 3 hours.

So that is 4.5 kW x 3 hours = 13.5 kWh.day^-1

13.5 kWh.day^-1 / 48 m² = 0.28 kWh.m^-2.day^-1

0.28 kWh.m^-2.day^-1 / 24 hours = 0.0117 kW.m^-2

0.0117 kW.m^-2 / 1000 = 12 W.

To me that's 281 watts per square meter on heat loss calcs. I would calculate a maximum of 120 watts per sq meter with Nexgen probably less subject to full heat loss calcs.. I appreciate you work on cubic meters heating air but that would be the calculation if we sized it. So with solar PV you can see it makes sense.

Actually I just worked out covering 100% of the floor or ceiling at an even temperature of 28C on the surface of our product we would be 116 watts per square meter. 

Edited July 14, 2019 by Clive Osborne