Making Roofs White

Painting your roof white can be as easy as painting any surface.

Making roofs white.

New research shows that white roofs may actually add to global warming. While white reflects the most visible light coloured roofs can also be made cooler by coating with materials designed to reflect light in the infrared spectrum which also contributes to how hot a. 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. First find a good paint.

Known simply as cool roofing this process is designed to reduce the solar radiation. New york for instance introduced rules on white roofs into its building codes as long ago as 2012. 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. 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 roofs white has been like changing lightbulbs one of the well cited easy ways out of climate change. So in other words installing a roof that is white or reflective helps save energy and money. Installing white roofs or painting them white has been promoted as a way to help slow global warming. By reflecting more light and heat back to the atmosphere a white roof should act like.

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. Rainwater that falls on a white roof however absorbs no heat. 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 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.

In 2017 more than 3 000 city rooftops were painted using both white lime and a special reflective coating. White roofs aka cool roofs are a hot topic these days as a means to help stem global warming.