Making Roofs White

Energy secretary steven chu has pressed americans to install cool roofs on their homes and business even committing his own department to making all its new roofs white.

Making roofs white.

By reflecting more light and heat back to the atmosphere a white roof should act like. But there are problems with this approach mainly finding a paint that will adhere to the asphalt shingles and last for more than a few years. Known simply as cool roofing this process is designed to reduce the solar radiation. Most of us know better than to wear black on a hot day but when it comes to the roofs on our.

Painting roofs white has been like changing lightbulbs one of the well cited easy ways out of climate change. In 2017 more than 3 000 city rooftops were painted using both white lime and a special reflective coating. If however you have a slanted roof or have never worked on a rooftop before you may want to consider contracting the help of a professional painter. But is the hype about cool roofs legitimate.

Rainwater that falls on a white roof however absorbs no heat. Painting your asphalt shingle roof white can indeed make your roof surface 45 80 f cooler under the hot texas sun and this should easily cut your cooling bills by 10 15. First find a good paint. New research shows that white roofs may actually add to global warming.

Volunteers have taken white paint to nearly 7 million square feet of tar roofs in the city though that is still only about 1 percent of the potential roof area. New york for instance introduced rules on white roofs into its building codes as long ago as 2012. Installing white roofs or painting them white has been promoted as a way to help slow global warming. White roofs aka cool roofs are a hot topic these days as a means to help stem global warming.

But white roofs by reducing the amount of solar heating at the surface also decrease the temperature difference between the surface and the air about a half mile to a mile up from the surface. Painting your roof white can be as easy as painting any surface.