The parent post says that the control test was done at evening, where the temperature was 82 F. So it’s not even comparable at all, imo.
+1 to this criticism, that’s a very valid problem which people should indeed be suspicious about, although “not even comparable at all” is overstating it (especially since we know what direction that problem should push).
The thermal time constant of a building is around a day, so you should really be running each of these tests for more than a day (and correcting for differences in ambient conditions). Basically, the control should exceed the average ambient temp because of solar and internal (e.g. electricity consumption) gains. And see my other comment about doing something about humidity removal. Then we might actually have something rigorous (based on doing an experiment with fairly expensive equipment, I still had error bars around +/-1°C, so I don’t think you have very much confidence at this point).
+1 to this criticism, that’s a very valid problem which people should indeed be suspicious about, although “not even comparable at all” is overstating it (especially since we know what direction that problem should push).
The thermal time constant of a building is around a day, so you should really be running each of these tests for more than a day (and correcting for differences in ambient conditions). Basically, the control should exceed the average ambient temp because of solar and internal (e.g. electricity consumption) gains. And see my other comment about doing something about humidity removal. Then we might actually have something rigorous (based on doing an experiment with fairly expensive equipment, I still had error bars around +/-1°C, so I don’t think you have very much confidence at this point).