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Air insulates heat transfer as well as (lower voltages of) electricity basically by just being there. Heat takes time to transfer between media. Consider a house's wall cavity without added insulation. There is a layer of drywall on the inside, followed by a layer of air, followed by a layer of wood on the outside. So for heat to travel from the inside to the outside it has to start vibrating the drywall molecules faster first (which is what we do when we heat anything up). Then it has to vibrate the molecules of air faster (and those buggers move around pretty easily). Then it has to vibrate the wood molecules faster, then the siding even. So air is just another layer that has to be passed through. The longer we make the heat take to transfer, the better insulated it is. Now add some fiberglass insulation to your house's wall cavity. Do you know that it is counterproductive to stuff as much insulation in as possible? Know why? Because air helps the insulation pass heat through more slowly! Imagine it... if there are thousands of layers of fiberglass, and air.... it's going to take that poor heat energy a while to vibrate all those molecules. But if you stuff that air space full of insulation.... the 'insulation' starts to behave like a solid chunk of fiberglass, which doesn't insulate as well as thousands of layers of fiberglass and air.

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16y ago

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