this video is sponsored by Hoymiles.
Heating and Cooling represent the largest contributors to your energy bills in fact in the U.S back in 1973 the average home was about 1600 square feet
but by 2019 that had risen all the way to 2300 square feet which means it takes more and more
energy to keep those spaces comfortable whether it's summertime or winter time and that's why
so much energy and effort is put into insulation and other Technologies to help lower the burden
that heating and air conditioning imposes and today we have something really exciting this
is a phase change insulation and this goes behind your drywall and it's supposed to save you a ton
of money on Heating and Cooling so how does it do we have a little bit of experimentation and data
to share with you and we're going to break this all down I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci
let's start with just insulation and its purpose the whole point of installation is to be a really
poor thermal conductor to be a bad bridge to break the heat or cool inside your house from leaving
to the outside in the winter time it's really cold outside so the heat in your house is going to want
to flow from areas of high temperature to lower temperature and you don't want that because you
have to keep heating that space and you'll lose it to the outside so if you put traditional bat
insulation or foam insulation that helps a great deal and the thicker your walls the more it'll be
resistant to changes in temperature but this is interesting because what this does is it works
in a completely different principle so unlike traditional bat or foam insulation that help
to be a bad thermal barrier to conducting heat phase change insulation Works in a little bit
of a different way as you can see here this is a product by a company called QE Platinum they're
not sponsoring the video but they did send me a sample to mess around with the first thing
you'll notice is that there's an aluminum foil outer casing that matters because aluminum foam
oil like this is a natural Radiant Barrier which means infrared energy from warm objects won't get
past us it'll be reflected back that's why a lot of homes now will have radiant barriers in the
attic and other areas and we'll get back to why that's really important during our testing stage
inside of here you've got this and what's really interesting about this is this is right now a
pretty cool room so it's in a solid state but if you start to warm this up this would absorb
that energy and change from a solid to a liquid instead of changing in temperature the same way
an ice cube and a cold drink keeps your drink cold while absorbing that heat to have to change State
into a liquid before we get into the data and the testing let's just talk about kind of what
we're dealing with here first of all this stuff is really durable it's meant to last and degrade
only about two percent in a hundred years and has a 30-year warranty it also has self-healing
properties meaning if one of these pouches were to rupture it'll potentially kind of seal itself
back up and even if it didn't the contents are totally safe and biodegradable in fact fact I
think it's made from like a soybean oil compound but this particular formulation is a little bit
of a trade secret I'd imagine and it's adjustable to your needs so when you call this company you
could tell them where you live and they could create a special blend that melts and freezes
at the exact temperature that makes the most sense for your house what's really interesting
as well is this is going into your house so fire safety is a Paramount concern and in the case of
the Kiwi Platinum it has a fire safety score of five and a smoke and Mitten score of five as well
on the astme 84 fire safety test now the lower the score the better for comparison spray foam
insulation is between 25 and 100 on flame spread and 450 on smoke emittance so this stuff is gonna
be the safest thing in your wall if you were to put it in so the fundamental principle is that
this is almost kind of like a thermal battery in your wall or in your attic in your crawl space
wherever you put it that charges and discharges during the day let's talk about how exactly
this works okay really quick before we get back to the video let me take a quick moment tell about
our sponsor this week Hoy miles and while we are using Hoy miles for our solar system and give you
a little update our panels are up we're about two weeks from finally being on grid and being able to
operate and with hoi miles micro inverters each panel has its own inverter which means that the
trunk is providing AC power to the house instead of having to put these all in DC and the really
cool part about Hawaii miles is they don't just make one-to-one inverters meaning each panel has
its own but they make these four to one and two to one and even six to one inverters so for this
string of 10 panels all we need is two four in one inverters which will power four and four and
a single two in one inverter for the final two so three inverters covers all 10 panels they're all
micro inverters each panel gets its own controller and doesn't have any shading or any other problems
so when you combine the design flexibility of micro inverters the really high efficiency and
longer life 25 year warranty typically with Hoy miles it's easy to see why they might make
sense for you so if you're a solar installer or a homeowner and you want to check this out we'll
have links in the description to see the inverts that we're using for our system huge thanks to Hoy
miles and you for supporting the show okay now to understand exactly how the phase change material
Works let's talk about water and what happens as you warm up water so if we were to start applying
energy like heat to a pot of water the temperature obviously goes up but then something happens
around let's say zero degrees the temperature stops going up for a while and the reason is
because now that energy doesn't go to increasing the temperature of liquid but it goes to Breaking
the bonds that make it a solid to melt it into a liquid once those bonds have been sufficiently
broken temperature can Rise Again obviously until 100 degrees Celsius now yes I understand that's a
really brilliant system of measuring temperatures and Fahrenheit makes no sense but let's not get
into that right now all we need to care about now is that yes the temperature will rise again until
100 degrees then again the temperature won't change for a while until it starts to go up
again that is the phase change to phase change water from liquid to gas also requires a ton of
energy and the opposite is true if things cooled off the temperature of the steam would lower
until it reached 100 and then it would just stay flat for a while until that steam condensed into
water and then it would lower down in temperature until it got to here when it starts to freeze and
when it freezes it's absorbing energy but not changing temperature and this is what the phase
change material is taking advantage of at night it's really cold outside and your house was warm
so this should be melted and kind of thawed out and as the temperature outside starts to dip this
liquid would start to solidify but by doing so it released energy back into the room so by being a
liquid and turning to a solid it'll release energy keeping your room warmer longer and then later on
in the day when the sun is out it starts to warm up again and instead of letting that heat into the
house it has to change the phase back to a liquid before the temperature inside your house goes up
but taking advantage of this phenomenon this small little pouch believe it or not has an amazing
insulative value as you mentioned before it's also Radiant Barrier we'll get back to that but if you
had an inch and a half of this material it has the same thermal mass as a 12 inch concrete wall
so to figure out if this makes sense for you you really need to have a little bit
of a temperature Delta during the day so here for example in San Diego our days even in the
winter can reach 60 to 70 degrees and at night especially this last year's been cold down to
around 35 to 40 degrees at night so that's a 30 35 40 degree Delta and that is enough
of a range that it can change the phase and actually be very applicable if you live in a
coastal area or near the equator the temperature doesn't change very much day to night you never
really get a chance for the battery to change State and to have value so it might not make
as much sense if you live in those kinds of areas all right so enough of that let's get
into the testing and the numbers one and brim my editors went ahead and built these boxes
foreign
we wanted to make something that kind of resembled a 2x4 traditional wall so we came up with this
design for a box it's pretty much a perfect square cube with a 16 inch interior volume with
2x4 framing we had an outside built of OSB wood and that left enough room for insulation in the
first go we had a control box with nothing it was just wood two by fours no insulation then we had
traditional rock wool insulation for the second box the third had rock wool and the QE Platinum
phase change material and finally we had a sensor outside kind of in the shade to just
measure the temperature outside so here is the data for the first week we had this running now
the first takeaway was that the installation did almost nothing because if you look at the control
box that had no insulation that almost matches up perfectly with the bat rock wool insulation
that we had so that made me realize I think we had a flaw in our testing because typically that
rock wool is by behind a sheet of drywall it's totally encased meaning the air can't just move
in and out of it but in our example it was open bat insulation that's no good because the way that
this insulation works is that it doesn't allow the air to move and the air is kind of isolated
and the air is a decent insulator by itself but if you have it open and hot air is able to rise and
mix and move through the bat it'll blend and mix and perform very poorly as you can see here also I
realized how do we know that the QE Platinum was doing the work or if it was the Radiant Barrier
that aluminum would provide anyway so we ran this test again and we'll get to that here in a moment
but if you look at this graph you can see that the bound the high and low temperature for the
QE Platinum is by far the tightest it never gets as cold as the coldest outside temperatures or
any of the other installations and it never gets as hot either but what's really interesting is
how well it performs when it was really hot out so here on February 9th it wasn't actually that
hot so the temperature actually never was higher than 71 degrees but inside both of the boxes the
ones insulation and the control it reached about 88 degrees and that's crazy that's a really hot
uncomfortable space you would have to run air conditioning to be able to accommodate that
but the QE Platinum never even reached above 67.3 degrees which is pretty remarkable never reached
as hot as even the outside air and that's because you had to melt all of that material before that
heat would then reach the room also if you look at the Kiwi Platinum you'll see the graphs are very
wide the temperature takes a lot longer to change and that's what thermal mass is able to do that's
why a big concrete wall just takes a long time to heat up and one once it's hot it takes a long time
to cool off and the QE Platinum just that little pouch has a similar looking graph you'll see the
day it gets hot and then it falls off quickly but the QE Platinum takes several hours later and it
never cools off quite as much I was shocked by these results honestly the difference in a few
degrees especially for us in the summertime could be a significant amount of a reduction in air
conditioning use like we mentioned before we had a question about that insulation that data just
screamed something's off so we ran the experiment again a second time and here's a stretch of two
days between the 16th and the 17th of February for us here in San Diego now what's interesting
is this time what we did is we added aluminum foil to the insulation box so now we had insulation
like before plus aluminum foil the aluminum foil blocks any air passing through allowing
the insulation to truly function correctly and it adds the Radiant Barrier component in fact if you
look at the coldest point on that red line down there there was a point where it was colder in
the Box than it was outside and I think the reason why is the concrete and the ground and the Earth
was just a little bit warmer than usual and that radiant heat hit Those sensors whereas inside that
box it was blocking that radiant heat and as a result the temperature in the Box was colder
than it was outside now again our our sensors and our equipment are not the highest Fidelity
so take all this to the grain of salt but I think generally you can start to see some patterns and
the same pattern emerges where the Kiwi Platinum has the tightest band the temperature variation in
those boxes are just way tinier than the so yes a Radiant Barrier is an amazing thing so if you
have an attic you have high temperature areas you live in Las Vegas or Phoenix or Florida a Radiant
Barrier in your attic would be a huge addition but the cube Platinum takes that to another level
honestly I'm pretty blown away I really want to add this to my house because if we're going
to go Net Zero I want to use as little energy as possible especially for running on batteries right
if you have solar and batteries you don't have to run air conditioning for any longer than you
have to and currently in our house it is horribly drafty we need to seal stuff up doors are leaky
and there's very little insulation in the walls I can tell because that house gets hot and cold way
too easily and we can fight back against it so how much would this stuff cost so speaking with
some people from kiwi Platinum they told me that their pricing currently is between 250 and 350
per square foot here in the U.S that means the average 2300 square foot American house which
is 40 by 60 feet and if you had eight foot walls we're talking between 11 000 and sixteen thousand
dollars including the roof which is actually the biggest part of the price remember this is just
exterior walls you wouldn't put this on the interior walls just the exterior walls so not
cheap by any means but the bigger question is if your house is fully finished you have drywall up
are you going to really rip out the drywall to add this maybe maybe not for us we know we want
to upgrade some of the electrical we want to do a gray water capture system we want to insulate
the heck out of our walls and then maybe put this in and then re-drywall so for us this is going to
be a cost I am going to pay and I want to have kiwi platinum in all my walls and also the attic
now for most people the most common use case is going to be putting it in your attic the attic is
a major source of heat and loss right because as heat rises you're going to lose a lot of heat or
bring in heat from the Sun heating up your roof so with the Kiwi Platinum material what's really
nice about it is it doesn't really require any traditional installation all you do is get your
typical blown in or bat insulation and then on top of that just lay sheets of the QE Platinum
you don't have to staple it down or anything else you got to get back up there to do some work you
can just roll them out of your way install a ceiling light and then roll it back in place
and the Q Platinum would have to change phase as we mentioned before ever changing the temperature
in or outside of your house but honestly as far as a recommendation it really depends on you how much
your house costs how much your bills are how long do you plan on living there how badly do you want
to save and be closer to Net Zero this is a very high end material but what's really cool is this
used to cost even more and they brought the prices down because what they started to do is roll this
out largely in addicts work with installers get larger and larger volume reach a certain level
of economies of scale to bring the prices down and speaking with the representatives over there
they're confident they can reach about a dollar ninety per square foot continuing to bring down
prices so hopefully that gives you an idea of if it's worth it for you or not that's hard to say
it just comes down to your own personal preference but I will tell you I'm going to reach out to Kiwi
platinum and figure out how we can get this in our house because I think living in San Diego this
stuff would be a game changer I I really think we could maybe not even need the heating but for an
hour or two a day and I don't think we would need the air conditioning maybe but for a week or two
a year and with our really ridiculous Energy prices thanks to sdg e this would be a added
benefit that I think would pay for itself over time so here's a couple of final thoughts right
as we mentioned before this stuff is safe so if you were to puncture it or as you were installing
it or put a nail through it you might lose some of the material behind but it'll dry out and it's
not going to harm anything it's not harmful to life or to the environment the whole material
is biodegradable and as you mentioned it's also safe so there's a lot of like ancillary benefits
that go along with it and while the material is really quite thin it does have some thickness so
you'll have to figure out how your walls are going to fit how the drywall goes in but that's mostly
a question for the installers and I'm sure I'm sure as they get more hip to this they're going
to know what they're doing and it's building codes around the world continue to get more and
more astringent I think materials like this can really help homes pass those passive standards and
higher Energy Efficiency standards that everyone is trying to build to so that is a look at the
QE Platinum phase change insulation it is wildly fascinating and the data I thought just totally
sold what this does and I think it's pretty amazing I'd love to know what you think would
you want to do this in your house have you learned something let us know in the comments below thank
you so much for watching as always I'm Rick with tuba DaVinci and we'll catch you guys next week