The non-insulated and insulated ducts are commonly applied in the industries and various buildings, because the heat radiation equation contains the 4th order exponential of temperature which is very complicate in calculations. Most heat transfer experts recognized from their own experiences that the heat radiation effect can be ignored due to the small temperature difference between insulated and non-insulated surface and surroundings. This paper studies in detail to check the inaccuracies of heat transfer characteristics non-insulated and insulated duct by comparing the results between considering and neglecting heat radiation effect. It is found that neglecting the heat radiation effect is likely to produce large errors of non-insulated and thin-insulated ducts in situations of ambient air with low external convection heat coefficients and larger surface emissivity, especially while the ambient air temperature is different from that of surroundings and greater internal fluid convection coefficients. It is also found in this paper that using greater duct surface emissivity can greatly improve the heat exchanger effect and using smaller insulated surface emissivity can obtain better insulation. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.