There is an article on WeChat called “floor heating, bringing warmth to you while slowly killing your children”. The general content of this article is that floor heating, a heating method, may cause increased incidence of leukemia, breast cancer and other cancers, decreased reproductive ability and visual system damage.
Perhaps many people saw this article, and their first reaction was to be dizzy by the repeated references to [floor heating] and [radiation] in the article. How can floor heating be linked to radiation?
Is the floor warm what?
In fact, most of the current use of [floor heating], the full name is [low temperature hot water floor radiant heating]. This kind of temperature regulation means, the whole building interior floor is used as a radiator, through the pipeline laid in the floor structure layer, hot water is injected into the pipeline, heating the floor concrete layer, making people feel warm [1].
1. Why is the use of floor heating not common?
As early as the 1930s, foreign countries began to use floor heating as a heating method.
However, due to the design limitation of floor heating, it needs to be installed under the floor made of concrete or other materials. Generally, the temperature of hot water in the transportation pipeline is required to reach 60 ~ 70 ℃ [2]. Once leakage occurs, the replacement or maintenance cost is very high.
Therefore, floor heating has very high requirements for pipes and floor materials. Due to technical problems at that time, floor heating has not been popularized.
2. Advantages of floor heating
However, floor heating is an environment-friendly energy supply mode. Even if the temperature is 2-3 ℃ lower than that of vertical heating, that is, the traditional radiator, the human body can still reach the same degree of warmth, so that energy can be saved by at least 20%. At the same time, it has the advantages of saving space, uniform heating and the like.
Therefore, in the past 20 years, with the rapid development of the material industry, Europe, Japan, South Korea and other high latitude advanced countries and regions have already adopted floor radiant heating as the main heating method.
How does ground warming have anything to do with diseases?
Perhaps because the full name of floor heating carries [radiation], it is taken out of context by rumor makers, and students associate floor heating with [leukemia] [breast cancer] [impaired fertility].
1. Does ground heating bring what [radiation]?
Yes, it is radiation again. This magical radiation, pregnant women buy expensive and useless anti-radiation clothing for it, and small white-collar workers set up a table of cactus pricking people for it.
However, few people can distinguish that the [thermal radiation] generated by ground heating belongs to [non-ionizing radiation], which is of the same type as radio waves and visible light and is non-toxic and harmless.
Why is nuclear radiation so terrible?
The frightening [nuclear radiation] is a kind of ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation has [radiation biological effect] and can kill biological cells and destroy biological tissues. Thermal radiation has no such effect. Do you think, have you ever heard that radiators cause leukemia?
The author is not a physics researcher, here is a more detailed and easy-to-understand video for your reference: popular science animation < < 6 minutes to understand radiation > >
It can be seen that the original text said that floor heating increases the probability of [leukemia] and [other cancers] through radiation, which is clearly a rumor.
However, it is worth noting that other problems caused by the central heating season.
What are the health problems in the central heating season?
1. Outdoor and indoor air quality issues
Since the current mode of energy supply is mainly coal, Therefore, during the central heating period every year, soot pollution in each heating city will increase. Coal combustion, in addition to soot dust, sulfur dioxide, etc., will also produce a persistent organic pollutant-polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). This pollutant can accumulate in the human body and is indeed carcinogenic, teratogenic and mutagenic.
2. Temperature and humidity issues
The original text also mentioned that warm ground can cause cataracts and reduce reproductive ability. Both rumors were invented by people who know but do not know why.
Why do you say that?
The reason is that high temperatures do damage the lens and hinder sperm motility. However, the warmth brought by warm ground is obviously not enough to cause such physical diseases.
(1) The [high temperature] of the ground is not enough to cause cataract.
The high temperature causing lens damage generally refers to the temperature of close contact [blast furnace steelmaking], while the short-wave infrared ray that can cause lens damage generally has a wavelength of 800 ~ 1 200 nm [4].
However, as mentioned just now, the temperature in the floor heating tube is generally 60 ~ 70 ℃, and the room temperature caused by the floor insulation layer is comfortable 20 ~ 26 ℃, and the thermal radiation wavelength of the floor heating is between 8 ~ 13 m [2], which is still a long way from causing lens damage.
(2) Ground warming in daily life style will not lead to sperm damage.
We generally recommend young men to avoid high temperature bath, because high temperature can indeed reduce sperm motility.
To keep the floor warm to a temperature that damages sperm motility, unless you take off your pants and split them into words to sit on the floor. Even if the male owner has this hobby, it is impossible to keep this posture as soon as he comes home.
(3) Water replenishment is required during the central heating season
However, another point that needs to be noted is that cities that need heating generally have high latitudes, dry air, and sufficient heating, so the water shortage of the human body is actually obvious.
Therefore, when heating at the beginning, due to dry air, sudden nosebleeds or colds are more common. These need to be adjusted by increasing air humidity and reducing indoor temperature.