WHITE ROOFS
20 Aug '09 from the editors
If you watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, you may have caught the interview he did with Steven Chu. If you missed it, CLICK HERE
Steven Chu is the Energy Secretary. As the Secretary of Energy he knows a lot about the environment. One of the simple solutions Chu has talked about is the white roof. No, it's not a political colloquilism, it's literally a white roof. Yes, it's common sense, another ' environmental solution' that celebrates common sense.
Changing your roof color to white will reduce cooling costs by as much as 20 percent. That's big savings in warmer climates. It's also less time putting out harmful emissions from running your air conditioner. Chu suggests that not only change your roof to white but the pavements as well. 'It will have a profound effect in the climate conditions, (similar to) if you took all the one billion cars off the road for eleven years.' The color white on such large wide surfaces reflecting such huge amounts of heat back into space packs a great environmental punch.
Another great part about the suggestion is that there are no gimicky white roofs that are a better shade of white or what not. You can just paint your roof white if you wanted to. The popular choice has been a white plastic, and the white panel.
Check out lots of other great stuff on the topic in our Framing and Roofing Workshop!
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Cool Roofs don't have to be white
In an article I wrote - benefits of cool roofing you can see that a cool roof does not have to be white, to provide great financial and ecological benefits. Still, white color with reflective cool-roof pigments will be the most energy efficient roof.
In the picture above the roof is actually cedar clap-boards painted white. What I don't like about cedar is that it will rot in 15-25 years and the whole re-roofing cycle will repeat. That is why I always recommend metal roofing systems for sloped roofs and cool IB flat roofs for low-sloped to dead-pitch flat roofs.
Find out more info about different metal roof systems and DIY installation guides in our Metal Roofing Blog.
What about green roofs? One
What about green roofs? One of their advantages is that they keep the sunlight from being reflected, thus overheating urban areas... So is reflected sunlight something neutral, positive or harmful for the environment, after all??
White roofs look nice but if
White roofs look nice but if all the roofs of a city get painted into white colour, the city is then monotonus. It's for me even harder to imagine what will be if the pavements are also turned into white colour. There must be a balance between life quality and environmental protection.