It's well-established in physics that black or dark-colored objects radiate heat faster and more effectively than light-colored objects.

So, in almost every building that uses steam heat, why are the radiators painted silver or some other very light color?

It probably doesn't matter too much about the colour of a radiatior, because car radiators are black, and they are split into millions off little flaps, so they have a huge surface area, and they do a lot of the heat losing by convection.

Posted by Helen on 2003-03-21 05:22:16