Winter brings with it costly heating bills, and what you may not realize is a lot of your money is being wasted on heat you never feel — the heat that’s up at the ceiling.
That’s due to a phenomenon called stratification. Stratification can be summed up in three words: hot air rises. When heat is introduced into a space, it forms temperature layers, or strata. The warmest air is at the ceiling; the coolest is at the floor where people work and live. This creates obvious problems in terms of both comfort and expense.
And when you consider heating amounts to more than 35 percent of a commercial building’s annual energy consumption, according to the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, those problems quickly cause budget pressures.
