Do you have access to a thermal imaging camera? It would be interesting to see a photo of the heat loss from these campers, so we would know where to focus our insulating efforts. (I know the pop top is the first place to start, but at what point do we move on to the window or the wood bottom.)
We do have a
FLIR camera at work. Though I'm effectively "retired", I'm actually on a "Leave of Absence" and so technically still an employee. I bet that if the FLIR isn't being used they'd let me borrow it. I don't remember what kind of interface it has, but I've used it before -- to record temperature grandients caused by an evaporating pool of solvent on metal!
According to the link noted above, the emissivity of glass is 5%, aluminum 90%. Major difference.
OK, thanks -- they are very different. But aren't the numbers the other way around? Aluminum has a very low emissivity and glass has a high emissivity. Aluminum has a high reflectivity.
I found a handy table here:
Emissivity Coefficients of some common Materials
Fortunately, for the functioning of an IR thermometer, a lot/most common materials have emissivity >0.9, and it's only polished/shiny metals that have very-low emissivity of <0.1.
Interestingly, hardly anything is in the middle, except oxidized/rough metal and rocks.
OK, so bottom-line, I can probably use the IR thermometer to read for comparison of the temperatures of glass and plastic...and probably the painted aluminum sides/roof of the camper will have high emissivity, too, or close enough.
Glass starts getting opaque in the thermal IR, although it is dependent on what type of glass you have. Anyway, the glass could indeed be an okay insulator
OK, so glass is a good insulator against transmission of IR radiation (i.e., opaque to it -- which is why/how glass greenhouses work), but it's not a good insulator against heat-transfer by conduction (which is why homes have double-pane glass). But since the basis for my analysis is that all that matters (as a measure of overall insulating ability) is the external temperature of a camper surface, glass will give the same response as the plastic soft-sides, which is good.
Man...I wish I had a lab tech to carry this out! I'm much more interested in designing experiments and analyzing their output than actually conducting experiments.
I need an intern! Damn, I'm lazy!
