Do Radiant Barriers Work & How Much Energy Will it Save: Real Home Owners Experience (Before/After)

hey it's brent from greyhouse studio if you saw our video that we posted last you'll see that we're on a quest to save a little money uh on our energy bill we figured out using uh sense monitor some things that were costing us a lot of money and then i also realized our air conditioner kicks on every 15 minutes in the summer and it takes about 15 minutes to cool off and then it kicks off and kicks back on so it's on non-stop and when we got a new roof i started looking into radiant barriers my understanding was that a radiant barrier was something that was on the sheeting that you could install and it looked like foil so if you build a new house i see them a lot in texas on spec houses kind of nicer spec houses they'll put radiant barriers my understanding was that that was something that you had to put on before the roof so i was looking into it and i realized that most of them that are put on with the sheathing don't actually do anything because the radiant barrier requires an air gap and the purpose of it is to reflect the radiant energy instead of conducting straight through that radiant barrier with no air gap the point of this video really is to look at the facts which are the sensors that i have on the electric box and the sensors in the air ducts i can see the temperature changes in the attic the garage and the air duct and then see how often my air conditioner kicks on and off that's really all i care about if none of that changes then the radiant barrier doesn't work in my eyes and i really think that if i can decrease the temperature in the attic then the air conditioner will have to kick on significantly less because i've noticed that the air ducts get hot so in the summer when the air kicks on it's blowing 80 plus degree air into the house for a minute or two before it finally starts to cool off if the air cycles on for 15 minutes it's blowing hot air for the first two minutes then it finally cools down for about five minutes if i can get the attic temperature from 140 to the temperature it is outside which might be 100 on a really hot day i think that will be a win so we'll look at those sensors and see what the bill looks like everything i see is people trying to sell you on this kind of magic thing that happens when they put it in your attic and it saves you half of your energy bill and they can't really tell you why it's just if you hire them to install this magic technology called a radiant barrier then it will save you tons of money and eventually it will pay for itself and they don't tell you how much the product costs how much they're trying to install it it's just a flat fee and they tell you you'll recoup the money eventually i did some research and stumbled across ecofoil.com and they focus on the diy aspect of radiant barriers which is really helpful because they actually focus on the material the radiant barrier and tell you what it does how to install it and what the price is so you can get it install yourself or i guess you could buy it and then pay somebody to install it i decided to go the route of installing it myself and i got a ton of it basically you measure from the bottom make sure there's an air gap so that the air can move through the attic without being blocked what we don't want to do is completely seal the attic and create moisture issues because it's super humid here so i tape the seams it makes it look nice but know that there's air gap at the bottom and the top and the point is to cover as much space as you possibly can with the radiant barrier so that that radiant heat that's coming through our black shingles that's like 40 hotter than the outside air is reflected back into the air gap once i've measured that two or three inch gap and measured the top then i just staple the top corner unroll it staple the other top corner and then hand staple at all the studs moving down and then hand staple the bottom and throw a couple in the middle and then i move on to the next one and i put them right next to each other it's not important to be perfect it's just a matter of covering as much surface area as possible then i'll tape it to clean it up again the tape isn't to create a tight air seal where nothing can get from the behind it to in front of it it's mostly to clean up the edges and make it look nice that's also why this radiant barrier is white on one side and silver on one side the silver is reflecting it back out and the white just looks nice inside so here's some data from the sensors i put in the air duct and the garage the humidity actually gets up to like 80 because the air conditioner is never on long enough to lower the humidity in the house but it has to come on so frequently that it's never quite dehumidifying the house so that's a bit concerning if i kick over to the kick over to the attic in the same month of september you can see that the temperature will fluctuate at night when the sun's down it will almost get down to the temperature that the outside air is at but during the daytime as soon as the sun comes up you can see at like 9am 8am the temperature just skyrockets to 120. now that we're in november and we've installed a radiant barrier the temperature hovers right around the ambient temperature outside so if you measure the temperature in the shade that would be about the temperature in the attic you can see in this video when i measure the temperature of the sheathing that i left bare to test the difference it's measuring between like 92 and 95 and then if i kick over to the radiant barrier it's measuring 78 which is roughly about the temperature outside you can see based on the sensor's reading the overall attic temperature is about the same and then the temperature in the air ducts fluctuates significantly less so that experience i was having where the air would kick on it would be 85 degrees for three or four minutes before finally getting down to 75 70 upper 60s now it stays more consistent and when the air kicks on it becomes the temperature it's supposed to be the condition temperature much quicker and i think that makes it dehumidify a bit quicker if you find this helpful definitely hit the like button down below to let me know and leave us a comment if you have any questions there's a ton of videos on radiant barriers i was interested in showing the actual effect it has in our attic and on the temperature inside our house and the air ducts found this content helpful be sure to subscribe to our channel greyhouse studio and check out our blog greyhousestudio.com for more content like this

Channel: Gray House Studio

Views: 23,227

Rating: 4.9278779 out of 5

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Id: dh5fBzJTueE

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020