maksimsg

to thermal insulate your home, there are two phases we need to understand: 1, during the direct afternoon sunshine; 2, after the sunsets in phase 1, energy is absorbed in the wall, transmitted through your window to the room, heat up your furniatures etc. in phase 2, the energy absorbed by the wall and furniture will be released to the surrounding, your flat will be pretty much like an oven. afternoon sun is horrible mostly because of the phase 2 problem, because your flat will be still hot even the sun sets. as mentioned by some fellows above, solar film is a good solution to prevent heat going through the window to heat up your furnitures. A good grade solar film could reject UV, and infra lights (it is the infra range of light carries majority of the heat but it does not give you the feeling of brightness), but allow visible light to pass through, so your room will still be bright, but less heat is transmitted and received by your room. this is basically to reduce the effect during phase 1. to tackle phase 2 problem, we need high thermal insulation materials (low thermal conductivity). someone mentioned thick wall to insulate heat, which is correct. because the outer surface of your flat (outer surface of the glass and wall) will be very hot after direct sunshine for hours. when the sun sets, the heat will be released to the surrounding, which is inevitable. however as long as the heat is not released to your room, it will be fine to you. so the whole idea is to prevent the heat of the outer surface of the flat from going into your room. the solution is to increase the resistance of the wall and the window. however there are other ways to increase the thermal resistance as well: double glazed window has a vacuum or inert gas filled between two glasses. vacuum is a very bad thermal conductor, which means even your thickness of the glass is not significantly increased, the thermal conductivity will be greatly reduced due to the vacuum in between. as for the wall, of course we do not want to increase the thickness to much to insulate the heat. the feasible solution is to use high density polymers such as high density polyurethanes, which has a very low thermal conductivity. meanint that you need a very thin layer of such material, whose thermal insulation effect is equivalent to a thick wall. or you can use those thermal insulation paintings as well. they have a lot of ceramic microspheres dispersed in the painting. the microspheres have low thermal conductivity, so a thin painting layer will be as good as a thicker wall too. I bought a flat similar to yours (afternoon sun), so I was looking for feasible solutions recently. as for the solar film, 3M is a good choice, you can find discussion in this forum. cost wise around 16 dollars psf. as for the wall, if you want to go with the painting, you can google insuladd for more information. but as far as i know, they do not have a distributor in singapore yet, I have contacted a local painting provider, who would like to give it a try. if you want to use polymer board, I do not know any place we can buy such boards in singapore so far. hope it helps