FOCUS HVAC
RADIANT FUTURE
Air conditioning has long been considered the solution to managing
our indoor climates, but it’s not actually very good for our health, our
wellbeing or the environment. There is an alternative argues Sheldon
Cooper, Pre-Contracts Director for climate control specialist Radiana
If you’ve ever sat under an air
conditioning unit, the chances are
you’ve felt a chillier than your colleague
sitting some distance away. This is
because the units blow out directional
cold air and don’t distribute it evenly
across a room. The systems also
recirculate air, which isn’t good for our
health and in order for them to work, they
need to extract warm air from a building,
which they do by throwing it outside -
creating the heat island phenomenon
which we’re increasingly experiencing in
our cities.
So what’s the alternative? Radiant systems.
It would be fair to say that as a nation, we’re
a bit sceptical of change, particularly when
it contains the word ‘radiation’. Radiant
38 MAY 2020
heating and cooling is completely safe
however and the term ‘radiant’ simply refers
to how heat is transferred. Hot always travels
to cold – you put a cold drink in the fridge for
example, the fridge doesn’t cool your drink
down, rather the relative warmth of your
drink is pulled towards the cooler walls of
the fridge, and so your drink begins to chill.
Radiant climate control works in the
same way. Radiant ceiling panels, by this I
mean plasterboard systems which contain
a network of cold-water pipes, pull the
warmth from objects in a room towards
the relative cool of the ceiling. The heat
then transfers through the plasterboard
by conduction, the water in the pipes is
warmed, fed through a heat pump, and then
channelled back around the ceiling until the
desired temperature is reached in the room.
If the technology exists and it works, why
aren’t radiant systems being installed as
standard, or being used to replace outdated
air conditioning units in our o ices and
communal spaces? There’s actually nothing
new about this form of climate control
– it’s been used in mainland Europe and
Scandinavia for years but in the UK, as with
any new entrant on to the market, there’s
an expectation that this technology might
be expensive. Yet if you took a typical threestorey
London o ice block and got a price
for a good quality air conditioning, including
ventilation with fresh air supplied and
installed, the cost would be the same if you
had a radiant cooling system installed.
The running costs of these systems are
also typically 40-50 per cent less than air
conditioning, and the maintenance per year
would be around half of that of a traditional
A/C system. What’s more, radiant cooling
systems can have a life expectancy of 25
years - twice that of most air conditioning
systems.