Radiant barriers do not help cool the air in your attic but they will stop the radiant heat from getting into your home. Adding a radiant barrier helps prevent this transfer of radiant heat into your home by reflecting it away from your attic floor. When too much heat enters through your attic into your home it really stresses your air conditioning system and makes your home much more expensive to cool. These radiant heat waves will travel through your roof until they are absorbed by the material on your attic floor and eventually that heat will end up in your home. Some heat travels into your attic by means of conduction while a significant portion of your roof’s heat is transferred by radiant heat waves. Much of those powerful rays contain sunlight’s natural radiant energy. The most common way for heat to build upon any roof is from the suns powerful rays acting upon it. That’s because dust will make the radiant barrier surface much less reflective and that makes it harder to do its job. It’s also important that any radiant barrier is installed in a way that minimizes dust accumulation on it. In order for them to do their job efficiently a radiant barrier’s reflective side must face an air gap of at least several inches. They will not perform as designed either if they are not properly placed. Radiant barriers are also sometimes called reflective insulation systems because of how they work. They have no effect when it comes to stopping heat conduction or convection and that’s why radiant barriers work in tandem with regular insulation.
More often than not radiant barriers are made of aluminum but any shiny metal that reflects electromagnetic waves in the infrared light spectrum will work. Radiant heat travels in straight lines until something solid absorbs that heat. Radiant barriers, as the name implies, are designed to stop radiant heat transfer. That’s by convection, conduction, and radiation. There are three ways that heat travels through and around insulation.
The only way to stop it from penetrating through to your home’s interior is to add a ‘radiant barrier’ to or around your insulation to reflect these waves away.
It’s not like normal heat because it’s found in electromagnetic waves which predominantly travel in the infrared spectrum of light. That’s because the heat that is found in your attic in the summer is what is known as radiant heat. It makes your air conditioning system work twice as hard as it should have to. Normal insulation has a lot of trouble keeping heat from passing around it during the summer months.
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