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Bill Clinton Says 'Paint Your Roofs White'
Hugh Pickens writes "Former President Bill Clinton thinks 'every black roof in New York should be white; every roof in Chicago should be white; every roof in Little Rock should be white. Every flat tar-surface roof anywhere! In most of these places you could recover the cost of the paint and the labor in a week.' Noting that Mayor Bloomberg started a program to hire and train young people to paint New York's roofs white, Clinton says a big percentage of the kids have been able to parlay this simple work into higher-skilled training programs or energy-related retrofit jobs. The benefit: not only will 'cool roofs' lower the utility bill in every apartment house 10 to 20 percent, but it frees cash that can be spent to increase economic growth. Clinton presented this with fourteen additional ideas for growing the economy, saving energy, and attacking the jobs crisis."
Much less *asphalt* shingles?!?!?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Here in North Dakota, we need all the heat we can get in the 8 months of winter :)
Spray gun maybe?
after that mayb a nw kabird.
Pigeons. Lots of Pigeons. Just sprinkle roof with bread crumbs, and get out of the way.
You don't. He's talking about flat roofs.
Shouldn't every roof be covered with solar panels?
Won't we have to just paint them black in time for winter?
Not to mention the expense of painters, paint, injury insurance...
Unless, God forbid, there might be places on Earth where people want to take in as much heat as possible...
You wash it very thoroughly with soap...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
...Bill Clinton is invested in Behr.
I've had white shingles for 8 years now -- chosen for this very reason. I turn on the A/C about 1/3 of the time my neighbors do (with black shingles). Saved me a lotta money :-) It's worth it long term on an individual basis and an environmental basis. When you can get both to coincide then it must be right!
With a spray gun?
White is good only for summer months, black is better in winter months. Can't they create a paint that will change color depending upon temperature?
Unfortunately, he will be ridiculed for this, just like Jimmy Carter was for putting solar panels on the White House.
I know there have been several article postings on slashdot about changing the roads to white color to reduce the absorption of the suns rays and reduce global warming. Makes sense if we all did it with roofs also.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
My heating bills in NJ are higher than the corresponding electric bills for air conditioning in the summer. Wouldn't painting the roofs white lead to a colder house in the winter? Should roof tiles instead be some sort of gray, depending on the area of the country, taking into account that local environments mixture of heating and air conditioning energy usage?
Considering how expensive they are, it's a bit harder to show how solar panels will pay for themselves.
I love my sig.
I live in Alaska. Arguably I should paint my roof black to help with solar heating. I don't need cooling. My house doesn't even have an air conditioner.
There must be locations somewhere between Alaska and Arizona where the logic for painting a roof white is not so clear cut. Should we paint roofs in Seattle gray?
thats racist.
What if I want a black roof?
Asphalt shingles come in any color you like.
I'd rather have black asphalt shingles and a soffit/ridge venting system that I can control, so I vent the heat in the summer or trap it in the winter.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
I spend a lot more money heating my house than cooling it, so I'll keep my dark colored shingles.
It will even get you free internet if you use RFC 1149.
A white roof would raise my heating costs in the winter. What I really need is a white roof in the summer and a black roof in the winter!
giggity
Do you paint them black again? Or do you just use up all that AC energy you saved on heating?
Everybody lives in the exact same situation and has the exact same needs. Thats why simple solutions that you put little or no thought into, like this one, always work. Right?
There's a product for this. It's designed to go over asphalt shingle and they call it ... wait for it ... "roof coating". Here's a link to the manufacturers' trade group: http://www.roofcoatings.org/wcc.html.
How long before we here the politicians whining that Clinton's trying to outlaw roof shingles or make everyone replace their roof.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm in Canada, you insensitive clod! :)
Does this also provide a benefit in the colder countries, like here in Canada?
Steven Chu said it earlier:
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/05/27/steven-chu-white-roofs-to-fight-global-warming/
New Economic Perspectives
Not that hard
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=asphalt+paint+roof+shingles
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
...all roofs in New York should also be painted black in winter, because damnit, it gets cold in New York in winter.
Repainting roofs twice a year sounds like one of those roller-ready jobs programs.
Howzabout some education grants to a few SMART kids, send them to college to get chemical engineering degrees, and invent roofing materials that reflect heat in summer and absorb heat in winter?
Years ago a lot of roads were white and made of concrete.
I could probably put a white tarp over it in Summer and pull it off int he Winter, it might even stop the moss growing on the shingles.
Nullius in verba
Painting them white is just racist!
The nice disadvantage of covering a roof with solar panels is that in case of a fire barely or no water will reach the fire.
buy a white steel roof. the initial expense will be made up by your labor. They are way easier and faster to install than shingle roofs you'll get 3-10x the lifetime. or just get light colored shingles the next time you replace your shitty inferior roof which you will likely need to do in the near future
However, bill clinton is probably wrong if he is recommending white roofs on residential (sloped) construction at northern latitudes. the reflectivity of your roof is a more difficult choice in chicago than in the sunbelt. I would be surprised to find a reflective roof a net gain for a house in Chicago.
That way it's cooler and will reflect much more light.
I get the A/C bill and it is through the sky.
The cash I'm wasting there it makes me want to cry.
(add more lyrics)
Okay, I'll go back in time and have them build my house with those. I'll also make a plea to the homeowners association to allow this while I'm there and maybe stop 9-11 from happening. Anyone else have any requests for shit for me to do while I'm in 2000?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If it's a good idea does it matter where it came from? Days are shorter in the winter so the impact of the sun is less substantial and as somebody else pointed out - it doesn't matter what color it is with snow on it.
If you live in a warm climate, next time you replace the shingles pick as light a color as you can.
Well, that raises a very good question.
What will white roofs do in the winter? Make the building colder?
I think it costs more to cool down than to heat up, but what happens if power goes out and there is no chimney?
Is the cost savings there after taking this into consideration or not?
While you save AC costs in summer, you block heat gain in winter. in Chicago and New York, the winter losses are greater than the summer savings
Where I live, homeowner association bans anything but the standard dark roofs.
And what about my frikkin' HOA? I so regret buying into a HOA-managed community. They will never approve white roofs.
I'd use white roof coating, rolled on some test shingles nailed to a sheet of plywood before trying any specific coating on a home. It may take a couple of coats to cover. I would also consider a light gray coating if available.
http://www.roofcoatings.org/wcc.html
The temp reduction is no joke. I coated the tops of my ISO container shop buildings and my metal house roof white. The ISOs are sealed, no windows (stormproof and keeps my gear dry) and get rather warm. White tops make them reasonable workspaces.
I didn't add the glass microspheres one can buy to mix with paints and roof coatings, but I'll do that next time. (BTW I fucking HATE asphalt shingles. If I won the lottery I'd use steel trusses and modern standing seam roofing.)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Buy white shingles when you redo the roof?
If you're talking 'bout my roofing
It do matter if it's black or white
*OW*
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
While I am all for measures that might help the environment, I would absolutely hate to drive on white roads. How much of that light is now reflected into the eyes of all drivers? Talk about making a dangerous situation much, much worse!
I always thought; "Why aren't roofs white" for this very reason.
"Certainly, SOMEBODY would have pushed to have light roofs and roads if it had a benefit." Turns out, that in human society, "somebody" is trampled under the hoofs of the stampede of EVERYBODY KNOWS....
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I hate to break this to you, but if you do own your house, you will end up putting a new roof on it sooner or later. My guess, given your tone, is that it will be sooner than you think it will.
Now would be a good time to bring this up with your home owners association so you can make the best choice when that time finally comes.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Are you a Rhodes scholar who has an engineering degree but doesn't have a law degree? Just sayin'. A lot of bad things are said about Clinton; but he is generally not accused of being stupid. I don't think digesting a study on roof-painting, analyzing it to see if it's a good idea, and coming to a proper conclusion is too difficult for him. I'd be more concerned, as others have pointed out, that he has an ulterior motive due to some relationship with a paint supplier or a contractors association. Now that's the kind of problem that Clinton might have. Morality problems yes, intelligence problems no.
Shouldn't that be "paint African-American roofs white?"
You'd think our first black president would know better
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
I am not a Clinton fan but he is probably correct on this one, at least in the context of the continental United States, and lets leave room for a few exceptions like our very arid South West region.
Suppose you live in Cleveland, Augusta, Boston, New York, Billings, Minneapolis, Louisville, Seattle, or some such place. Now lets assume you are right and your heating costs generally exceed your cooling costs. You might think a dark colored roof's absorption of solar radiation in the winter would be of more value than a white roofs reflection of it in the summer would be. Well yes, but in the summer your roof is exposed, but in the winter is probably covered with bright white snow anyway, so what color it is makes little difference.
Yes many people do shovel their roofs in the snowier climates, but few scrape them clean enough they are not for the most part white, all winter long.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
A) white paint is reflecting visible light. It's still absorbing most of the infrared. Depending on the formula, you could be taking on more heat from the sun.
B) if you have a properly vented attic space it doesn't matter what color your shingles are, and you will benefit all year round.
C) painting your roof white should come long after you upgrade your insulation, HVAC system, or any of a million things that would yield a better result
This isn't about the environment, this is a bullshit government jobs program, and is about money. Like recycling. Paying minimum wage to sort out glass and plastic bottles isn't helping the environment, it's just busy work for our increasingly useless population, and free money for our rulers.
Bill Clinton... painting things white... obvious joke here people.
LOL, pray tell, where does it go? Do you have any examples of this being a problem? Is this the really the boogyman you will rely on to promote something in the place of decentralized solar?
when it's hot, when it's cold your going to want your black roofs back again to absorb any heat you can get, to again save on utility bills.
sounds like what's really needed is a reversible surface that can change with the season.
Not listening to a potential good idea because he is a lawyer or because you disagree with his politics is closed minded and ignorant. I don't care who the good ideas come from as long as they are good. This appears to be a good idea. Besides, I am sure he is only lending his popular name and image to the idea to get publicity and did not perform an engineering study on his own. This is the same as Al Gore. He is not a climatologist. Just a good public speaker and motivator. Bush had some decent ideas too, but they were shot down just because they came from him. I didn't like it when that happened to Bush and I don't like that with Clinton. If you are still not convinced, then do your own study to see if he is full of crap. If the details of your study is "pfst he is a lawyer so fuck him!", then how many people are you going to sway with your argument. You just come off looking like an ass.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Find a white-roofed neighborhood and stare down at the roofs all afternoon on a sunny day. Or, if the neighborhood is hilly, just drive around in the sun without sunglasses.
To take advantage of the nickels you'll save on AC, you have to be able to stand living there.
- Capt. Obvious
One, the advantage of "painting your roof white" may depend on where you live. Even with this sweltering heat wave, those of us living far north of the Mason Dixon line spend far less on A/C than we do on heat. The reflective coating may not be best in every situation.
Secondly, it is not simply a matter of painting something white. An optimal coating has to have a high emissivity as well as high reflectivity. For example, a tin (galvanized metal) roof can get very hot because it is reflective, yes, but it doesn't emit heat very well either, and such a roof may not save on A/C usage.
Thirdly, there may be "lower tech" solutions to the same thing. I had a new shingle roof put up on my dad's place. We looked into the extra-cost Energy Star shingles that would have also qualified for the tax credit, but the roofer suggested going with a conventional shingle on account of cost, availability, and going with a known quantity in terms of lifetime, but the roofer installed ridge vents.
Those ridge vents keep the upstairs a good 10 deg-F cooler on sunny summer days. Of course ridge events are not "Democracy-whiskey-sexy" and do not qualify for Federal tax credits, but I would recommend them any day. Yes, by keeping the attic cooler, you get less solar gain in cold seasons, but by increasing ventilation, they should help dry out the insulation and make it work more effectively, both summer and winter.
If you want something said ask a politician, if you want something done ask an engineer.
There's a product for this. It's designed to go over asphalt shingle and they call it ... wait for it ... "roof coating". Here's a link to the manufacturers' trade group: http://www.roofcoatings.org/wcc.html.
How long before we here the politicians whining that Clinton's trying to outlaw roof shingles or make everyone replace their roof.
It costs about $10 to $15 per gallon, and covers about 100 sq feet.. So its going to cost me about a months electric bill to paint it on. At a 10% savings it'll pay for itself, at about 3 months of summer per year, in about 4 years. That skips a whole lot of accounting "net present value of the money vs the loan interest rate vs a typical rate of return of my favorite PRPFX mutual fund". Also skips the cost of labor and the environmental cost of making the goop itself. The problem is the stuff HD sells is warranted at 7 years, and everything there is very optimistic as you know.
So its probably not an economic success in most of the country, especially not CHC or NYC as the x-prez claimed. In FL TX AZ or the reconquista areas of CA, it probably makes economic sense.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Isn't there a Reason roofs are black? At least in northern climates isn't it to melt snow/ice accumulation and prevent catastrophic house collapses? I'm all for saving energy but not if it risks loosing your home to do it. Maybe theres a business opportunity here, a low cost white wrap for roofs, kind of like what is used to protect boats over the winter. Or some automatic "awning" that covers a roof with a thin plastic sheath during hot calm days but retracts it during cold or windy days. Simply "painting roofs white" seems to be a risky proposition to me, and aimed far more at creating some artificial boost to the economy then any real improvement to home efficiency.
What will white roofs do in the winter? Make the building colder?
A roof is white in winter because of the snow.
Said another way, we already have white roofs in cold climates in the winter because the snow makes the shingle color irrelevant.
Exactly: There's much more sun in the summer than the winter, i.e. white shingles will "help" in the summer much more than they "hurt" in the winter, even if your roof isn't covered by snow.
Also heating (especially if it's via a new gas furnace, even the cheaper models are running over 90%, so efficient their chimneys can be made out of PVC pipe) is MUCH more efficient than even the best AC unit.
People with a vested interest against change invest exceptional vehemence in queering any initiative that reeks of cost-effective progress. Here 1%, there 1%, pretty soon you're driving a solar powered apple cart.
People are raising eyebrows about painting asphalt. For a real challenge, try slathering another layer of ridicule on ex-president Clinton after the Republicans spooged a million cans of peach mint flavoured Dream Whip on his illustrious doings.
Elastomeric seals cover just about anything. A quick search on google (http://www.google.com/search?q=elastomeric+asphalt+shingles) shows a few different brands that say they specifically cover asphalt shingles. I personally have a flat roof and have used elastomeric products to extend the life of my roof a few more years.
Asphalt shingles come in any color you like.
I'd rather have black asphalt shingles and a soffit/ridge venting system that I can control, so I vent the heat in the summer or trap it in the winter.
I'd rather have solar panels (or something else to capture the heat energy) completely covering the roof with an air gap underneath.
Keeps the solar energy off the roof, and lets me do something useful with it. (I live where we spend much more energy trying to cool houses than to heat them)
The difference is even greater because in the winter, there is less sunlight to do the heating. The savings during the summer win hands down. If the power goes out, the color of the roof is not going to make an appreciable difference--unless maybe you sleep in the attic. Never heard of anybody doing that.
you would paint the holiday home black, if you had paint, if not then only the roof. and you would have built the house with short bits of leftover planks (they were built in tight villages, smart, in russia).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Email me to get out of the stock market
After we get every surface painted white the climatologists will discover that reflecting energy back into the sky somehow leads to reduced cloud cover causing a net increase in global temperature. Mark my words. Or not. I'll just link back here when it happens.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Anyone else have any requests for shit for me to do while I'm in 2000?
Yeah, make home owners associations illegal.
They were supposed to be for paying for common areas (tennis courts, pools, etc...) and to keep Mr. Trash from putting his car on blocks in his front yard and his pack of dogs in the back. Now, they've turned into fascist organizations that will have their lawyer fine you and charge you thousands of dollars because you used the wrong color of beige on your front door.
Why Home Owner's Associations bring down property values:
1. if you live near folks who do those kinds of things, an HMA isn't gonna do you much good AND if you do need an HMA then you have trash living there.
2. Some of them have resale fees buried in the covenants and sometimes hidden by the real estate developer - bunch of fucking crooks in on it with the bankers.
Now, I'm going to make some sweet and sour sauce with this bitterness.
I wonder if there is room in the market for a safe, biodegradable white paint. Something that we can paint on in the early Summer that more or less lasts until the start of the Fall. Yeah, it would make roofs look terrible, but if someone could spend $20 on paint but save $200 on cooling costs, people may be interested. I would be. A few hours of work for (in this theoretical example) $180 less spent? That's a good deal.
My house doesn't have air conditioning at all - it's an old Victorian deal with hot water heat and no air ducts at all. Being able to reduce the temperature in the Summer by a few degrees would be excellent.
Love sees no species.
Yet another perfectly logical idea that will be ignored if we're lucky, mocked and derided and turned into a talking point if we're not, just because of the messenger. The fact that this comes from a high-profile democrat means that so-called conservatives throughout the US will dismiss the idea out of hand without paying it any thought, and will go on to turn it from a cheap and eminently viable way of conserving energy into a laughingstock through the sheer force of their ignorance.
Don't believe me? What do you think of the notion of filling your tires up a little more to improve fuel efficiency?
This sig has been stolen. Return it to its original user for a reward.
My roof is silver because that's the color of the coating they put on when they re-sealed it last fall.
Suck it, Clinton!
1)Ridge vents can only be installed on pitched roofs. Many large buildings do not have pitched roofs.
2)Painting a roof white requires no permits, construction, tools (save paintbrushes and maybe brushes/cleaning solutions), specialized skills, etc.
3)Titanium Dioxide, used to make many white paints white, is a photo-catalyst, which means it can self-clean and chew up pollutants in the air.
4)A ridge roof vent that is controllable requires control systems and whatnot. White paint simply works.
#2 is particularly important for people with few vocational skills...and landlords who, especially in NYC, are really, really cheap assholes who view tenants as human ATMs, and who won't do anything unless there's a quick, proven payback.
Clinton's point is that white paint is cheap, easy, simple, reliable, has virtually no operational expenditure, and a quick payback. Installing ridge vents shares almost nothing in common with his solution.
Please help metamoderate.
Granted most solar installations don't cover even 1/2 of a roof's area, but the AC brings up at least a plausible concept to explore.
Personally though I figure that if they are spraying the roof it's because there are holes in the roof made by the fire and they are hoping the water goes in said holes; in which case the panels likely aren't in place anymore since the trusses will have burnt through. Not to mention the burning of said solar panels in the fire, can't be exactly great for the environment. (No idea how much more worse than the burning of the household materials already is...could be a very small addition of bad stuff).
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You'll want to clear the area of Robert Frost first.
Insulation works both during summer and in winter and is used in housing in Europe. It is not expensive (although painting is definitely cheaper) and it does not impact the roof aesthetics. 10 inches of mineral wool is a good starting point but in colder climates, more is better.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Of course that's even better, but ist isn't cheap enough that everyone can afford it. And that's what makes this so compelling: It's so cheap that you have an astronomic ROI. (if you have A/C. And have warm summers to start with)
bickerdyke
Changing shingle coloring is not a new idea, on that note, nobody's done it either. In fact none of the stuff on the list is new, but... why is this guy still politically active? Because people listen to him, he SHRUNK our national debt, something that seems in a different dimension after Bush America. The only problem is the lack of motivation to do any of this, I'm not going to go get paint, get on my roof and paint because I read this. I'd only consider letting the government do it, perhaps an energy tax credit or a waiting list?
Ideas are useless without a path to get them done.
Buy Apple. Lots of Apple.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
In the summer we (Northeast) get 15 hours of sunlight, with the sun directly overhead at midday. In the window, we get ~10 hours of sunlight, with the sun relatively low in the sky. I would wager that the benefit of a white roof in the summer is greater than the benefit of a black roof in the winter.
Guano... *shivers like Ace Ventura at the thought of bats*
The benefit: not only will 'cool roofs' lower the utility bill in every apartment house 10 to 20 percent, but it frees cash that can be spent to increase economic growth.
So, money that is spent on heating costs doesn't have any effect on the economy? Where does that money go then?
Now, I'm all in favor of reducing energy usage, and lowering costs for the average person, but to say this will create economic growth seems a bit silly. No new money is generated by this, just shifted. It merely reduces money going into one industry, and divides among others (including the makers of white paint).
In fact, if this promotes more people to *save* money (and not spend it at all), it could even potentially slow economic growth.
Paint black in the winter to reduce the heater usage.
I've done a few blog posts on this, a number of my friends researched the heck out of this issue.
http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2009/12/solar-heat-number.html
http://thegreentank.blogspot.com/2010/09/notes-on-heat-reduction-on-roof.html
I will post the highlights here:
For most materials absorption and emissivity of IR is usually the same for any given frequency.
Paint: Krylon, flat white #1502 @ 3m wavelenght = 0.992 emissivity
So weirdly enough this one specific "Visibly" white paint has one of the highest emissivities, and would absorb and reflect a lot of heat almost the same as the black paints!!!
What you really need is a Selective Coatings
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
I think Bill can provide enough white 'paint' for everyone's (women) roof (of the mouth).
Exactly: There's much more sun in the summer than the winter, i.e. white shingles will "help" in the summer much more than they "hurt" in the winter, even if your roof isn't covered by snow.
Yeah that'd be my opinion on the matter. I live in Texas so in summer a white roof would be a fairly significant help by reducing attic temperature. In winter a white roof wouldn't make much of a difference, if any difference at all, in warming the house.
But I guess at night white roads would be much better than black. Exactly because they reflect more light into the eyes of the driver.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It always cost more to air condition space than it does to heat it. It goes back to newton's laws of thermodynamics (I forgot which one).
That skips a whole lot of accounting "net present value of the money vs the loan interest rate vs a typical rate of return of my favorite PRPFX mutual fund".
It is a telling sign of how fucked up your country is the fact that you have to consider a loan (or implicitly, using a credit card) for a $10-$15 purchase.
Start living on your own fucking money. It's not that hard.
That's right! Don't you know that Bill Clinten is always WRONG about everything, always and forever?
That you slash heads are fucking idiots.
Roads turn grey on their own. Only brand new roads are black. White roads will also turn gray anyway. For instance a heavily used concrete road does not stay white.
Anyway, what percentage of the surface area of, say, the USA is road? Would you even see a difference from a satellite view if roads were whitened?
In attacking problems, you have to make a list of the important things you can do and work your way down.
For instance, if you want to fix broken finances, you don't do that by pinching pennies while continuing to do big things wrong. (``Penny wise, pound foolish'').
If you want to lose weight, you don't do that by parking a few feet further from the building or taking a few flights of stairs, while you continue to stuff yourself.
Etc.
The adage "Every little thing adds up" is true, but it poorly translates to action.
See, he wasn't having an affair, he was just trying to show Lewinsky the cooling effects of painting something white, and used her dress!
You could go one better and use bituminous aluminium roof paint. It reflects like a dull mirror.
Suppose you live in ...Seattle....in the summer your roof is exposed, but in the winter is probably covered with bright white snow anyway
No, in the winter the roof is covered in dark green moss. In the summer the moss turns light brown. I wish I were more than half joking.
Any decently educated highschool grad can tell that a black colored object absorbs and radiates more heat than a white colored object of the same dimensions.
This being slashdot, I doubt if many posters graduated highschool or paid attention while they were studying.
A WHITE ROOF WILL NOT MAKE YOUR HOUSE COOLER IN WINTER. IT WILL HELP YOU CONSERVE HEAT.
How long before we here the politicians whining that Clinton's trying to outlaw roof shingles or make everyone replace their roof.
I'm waiting for the complaints from pilots that they're getting sun-glare.
It costs about $10 to $15 per gallon, and covers about 100 sq feet.. So its going to cost me about a months electric bill to paint it on. At a 10% savings it'll pay for itself, at about 3 months of summer per year, in about 4 years. That skips a whole lot of accounting "net present value of the money vs the loan interest rate vs a typical rate of return of my favorite PRPFX mutual fund". Also skips the cost of labor and the environmental cost of making the goop itself.
If you're going to be that precise about it, you should also count the full cost of not painting the roof, which is not just a lower energy bill but also less wear and tear on the cooling system (which is therefore likely to last longer). There's also the environmental cost of producing the energy that does the cooling. Moreover, in NYC in particularly many of the affect buildings would be apartment buildings, which have a much better ratio of residents-to-roof-surface than single-family homes (and even single family homes in NYC tend to be smaller than in most of the US).
.sig withheld by request
(as long as they're up there) I'd rather we cover all the roofs in sunny places with photovoltaic cells.
What, why shouldn't you be able to paint shingles? Use acrylic paint.
The shingles themselves aren't actually asphalt, you know--they are fiberglass. The easiest solution is to wait until next time you reshingle the roof, and then reshingle with white shingles.
Of course, you'd want to use black shingles in places where the heating bills are greater than the air-conditioning bills, and white shingles in places where the air-conditioning bills are greater than the heating bills. But that's not really a good calculation-- you get more solar energy in summer than winter, so you all other things equal, you lose more in air conditioning due to summer heating on a black roof than you gain from lower heating bills due to winter heating on a black roof. So better metric is to use white shingles if (airconditioning bills) times (summer solar energy input) is greater than (winter heating bills) times (winter solar energy input).
However, a better solution YET is to plant deciduous trees around the house, which will shade the house in summer, and then lose their leaves in winter. Problem solved!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Please Google "opportunity cost".
Buy a boat load of Red Hat shares at 5$ a share :>
If this energy-saving technique catches on, the electric companies will instantly raise prices to compensate for their losses.
This has happened before. In theory they are regulated and must ask permission to raise prices. In practice they always get their way when they play the "can't run our business without it" card.
So this may be good from an energy-saving perspective, but it won't do the consumers any good from a cost-saving perspective.
What next, fully inflate your tires?
Ummm. A high percentage of interstate highways in Florida ("The Sunshine State") are white - the color of concrete. Not a problem there.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Ah....'tis nice to live in the land of NO homeowners associations.
If I buy MY own house, I should own it, and not be able to be told by a bunch of neighbors what I can and cannot do with it (short of city wide ordinances for safety, etc).
I can't believe how those Homeowners associations have proliferated so greatly, and why so many people out up with this.
Once you buy the land...shouldn't it be YOURs to do with as you please? I'm surprised someone with enough spare $$ and time hasn't had many of those agreements thrown the fuck out.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In areas where it doesn't get terribly cold but heat is still nice to have, an air source heat pump (which is damn close to an air conditioner) will give several units of heat for each unit of energy put into it. That beats any combustion furnace, at least until it actually gets cold outside.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Actually, considering how expensive it is to re-roof a house, if you reroof with solar panels instead of shingles, it's not all that much more expensive.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Well...
A fairly small bit of googling will get you readily assembled panels for $1.50/W. http://www.sunelec.com/solar-panels-c-5.html
Admittedly, these require actually mounting on the roof, and grid-tie inverters.
But let's ballpark these at $3/W.
In sunny Scotland, I pay $.25/kWh of power.
A 1kW panel produces around 900kWh/year of electricity.
( http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/apps4/pvest.php)
At current prices, this 1kW panel would produce $225/year, or payback (neglecting interest!!!) in 6 years.
And I've just got notice that bills are going up 10%.
For 'solar laminates' - these are the bare glass panels with solar cells on which need a frame made, the cost is around $1/W, so payback can be lots sooner in some cases.
(this assumes that I can simply backfeed the meter. In the UK as it stands, you cannot do this)
For places with lower electricity prices, payback is questionable.
Teach those idiots in Florida how to use a butterfly ballot.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Lets qualify that. In North America you will end up putting a new roof on sooner or later. Heck in Europe you can probably get a good couple of hundred years out of a good roof. Maybe more.
Said another way, we already have white roofs in cold climates in the winter because the snow makes the shingle color irrelevant.
I live in Wisconsin and my family is from Upper Michigan (we get enough snow in these area) and most roofs are not covered in snow in the winter. At least, not for long. It melts or it shoveled off because the weight of snow can crush a roof or overhang. Roof snow is very good at melting because they're almost always exposed to the sun. I'm sure there's some places where it snows and stays super cold that it prevents melt, but in those places, you usually brush the snow off.
Not around here. Most of the time in winter, it's just cold. No snow on the ground.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I mean, why did he get this idea suddenly? Why not last year, or ten years ago?
He must have just learned about white versus black objects and radiation.
I would not go so far as to posit that he may have read a book, or even a pamphlet.
Maybe he accidentally clicked on some wrong URL while surfing for porn?
Opposed by The Painter's Union of Greater Manhattan.
You also have to figure in the increased lifespan of your roof. The elastomeric coating seals and prevents leaks, and keeping the tiles cool to touch keeps them from breaking down.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here's $5000, please buy me some Apple Stock. Thanks!
Ummm...I don't have a black asphalt roof on my home in Mesa, AZ. I have clay tiles.
A couple of weeks ago the power went out during a day when the heat was around 108 for several hours. At 1pm. The house temp rose from 74 to 84 degrees in 4 hours. Sounds like those tiles do a pretty good job already.
But I don't think those tiles would do very well in climates with snow.
We sat outside in the shade with the misters on and were quite comfortable.
And yes, I keep my home at 74 instead of 78 or 80. I've had it set higher and haven't really seen much of a difference in electrical costs. I've saved over 33% on my utility bill by replacing the A/C with a more efficient unit, installing more efficient pool pumps, and replacing the refrigerator, washer, and dryer with more efficient units. Units were replaced as they failed, or were past their useful life. (I log both the usage and cost of my electric bill every month as well as my water usage. I can go back over 10 years and chart my electrical and water usage.)
Next up is the hot water heater. Probably go solar, makes sense here in the Valley of the Sun.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I strongly feel that anybody who posts a "lmgtfy" link could rightly be called a condescending asshat... Is that really what you want to be?
Bow-ties are cool.
I disagree. I am a painting contractor, and I think this idea is great for the environment, you capitalist pig. Oh, by the way, let me get my number, since you'll need a painter . . .
I bought into a non-HOA neighborhood. Now the builder who owns the empty lot next to mine is building a new house... sideways. There wasn't enough room to build the big hideous McMansion facing the street like everyone else, so he's putting it on the lot sideways. He just flushed the value of my house down the toilet.
So there are good reasons for HOAs.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
this conclusion is wrong and based on a common misconception that heat is always IR.
yes, but wrt absorption, you don't just care about IR, you care about all wavelengths. it's a common misconception that heat is only about IR. at Earth-ambient temps and for the case of emission, yes... but energy absorbed at any wavelength will be converted to thermal energy. That's why active solar heaters collector surfaces are designed to be dark and not light.
People joke about a roof that changes color with the season.
What about a fabric/mesh canopy and track system that could be deployed on hot days but stowed for cold season, damaging weather conditions, etc.? By using an appropriate mesh you could provide shade but allow ventilation and even water to pass through, so summer rain wouldn't pool up and overload the fabric.
It should be several feet above the roof when deployed; but when stowed, the tracks could be lowered flush with the roof to minimize the aesthetic disruption as well as protect the system from wind-blown debris and such. I wonder if some track and roller system could be made durable enough for automatic deployment and stowage, e.g. winch power to roll/unroll the fabric and tracks to guide and support it. Perhaps the entire assembly mounted on hinged supports (like a parallelogram) so the assembly can be winched up into a free-standing position or lowered back down flush with the roof. Techniques used in modern sailboat rigging might be feasible here?
Ideally you'd want the fabric to be cheap and easily replaced, such as with a standard sized roll pre-fitted to be hooked into a more permanent carrier system on the house. Or maybe even a "tractor feed" mechanism with repeating grommets along the edge of the fabric...
Holy supporting research Batman! http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-solar-panels-cool.html
Opportunity cost of a few hundred dollars?
You must be loads of fun to hangout with.
We did this once as a company project... everybody who wasn't afraid of ladders came in on a Saturday morning and we slapped down 20 gallons of white on the new black roof - relatively easy work, though it did involve being out in the 90 degree 98% humidity morning on a roof on Miami Beach for a couple of hours.
The guy who was afraid of ladders did keep a temperature log both before and after the project. We did indeed drop summertime internal temp by a significant and measurable margin (it's been over 10 years, I've forgotten exactly what that margin was, but it amounted to maybe an extra month of "liveable" temperatures inside.) Final result of the project: white paint still wasn't enough to help the anemic central AC unit carry the peak summer months, so we bought a $600 24,000 BTU wall unit, slapped it in and froze the place solid in August (well, at least got it down to 72...) And, since our lease agreement didn't have us paying for electricity usage, we surely weren't incentivized to do more than that.
Lesson one: end users should be financially responsible for carbon generating activities.
Lesson two: highly powerful A/C units are way too cheap and easy to install - you can buy a unit for less than 45 days' energy cost. People need to be educated on the true cost of ownership of these things (and portable electric heaters, too.)
For places with lower electricity prices, payback is questionable.
Or places with hail.
Ooh. Reflecting the sunlight to cool the house. The next thing they'll be telling us is that all the reflected sunlight is increasing atmospheric temperature and causing global warming....
Why would you listen to a fucking shyster regarding an engineering problem?
Because he's right and I don't let my ideology get in the way of evaluating scientific claims.
Maybe paint your roof white if you pay more for AC then you do for heat. Maybe.
Not maybe, yes. There is no form of heat that is less efficient and more costly than air conditioning. Heat generation is nearly 90% efficient with oil and natural gas, and 100% efficient with electric. Cooling is nowhere near that efficient. Plus, if you have an insulated attic your dark roof isn't going to do shit for the inside of your house in the winter.
Get over your hatred of Clinton long enough to make rational decisions.
Ok, roof is now painted white...
But my solar panels aren't working so well anymore..
My house has a typical black flat top. The roofer 15 years ago strongly suggested that I put white gravel on it, and it was a terrific idea.
Rocks don't decay, unlike paint. Years of sooty city rain don't make them much darker at all, because the sooty crap flows around the gravel. The roof is practically as good today as it was when it was built.
Keep in mind flat roofs are generally already coated with SOMETHING and require recoating every 5-10 years anyway.
Just swapping to white vs. black is a low-cost move if you already need to recoat your roof.
Also heating (especially if it's via a new gas furnace, even the cheaper models are running over 90%, so efficient their chimneys can be made out of PVC pipe) is MUCH more efficient than even the best AC unit.
All air conditioners have much higher efficiency than 100%. Currently air conditioners with efficiency less than about 1000% can't be sold anymore in the US (ie. 10kW heat pumped out while using 1kW electricity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioner#Seasonal_energy_efficiency_ratio_.28SEER.29
My geothermal heatpump is about 450% efficient for heating, while it is much much more efficient at cooling, simply because ground water is cold.
90% efficiency is OK for heat transfer during burning, but a power plant can be 65% efficient at that (fuel -> electricity) and then 450% efficiency brings that system up to about 300% efficient vs. just a furnace with 90%. The difference is a furnace has less capital cost up front, maybe by about $10k.
not buying a gas guzzler to haul your kids to school, even if you've piously put a made-in-China yellow ribbon magnet on it.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The nice disadvantage of covering a roof with solar panels is that in case of a fire barely or no water will reach the fire.
If your roof lets water in, yr doing it wrong. The whole point of a roof is to not water through.
(The reason that the firefighters spray water on a roof in the first place is to keep old-fashioned asphalt shingles from igniting-- if the roof is fireproof, that's a feature, not a bug. By the time the roof has burned through enough to let water into the house, it's pretty much too late to save the building.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
His math is wrong too. The electricity companies will have a 10% to 20% lower turnover, so the total economy will not change much.
What will white roofs do in the winter? Make the building colder?
In the summer, white roofs absorb less heat from the sun. Obviously heat from the sun is less of an issue in the winter.
Agreed. I live in Salt Lake City and the snow generally stays on natural surfaces most of the winter while usually melting off things like roads, sidewalks, and roofs pretty quickly after snowfall. This is even more apparent in late spring when snow only accumulates on the natural surfaces and just immediately melts on sidewalks and streets.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Cool your jets dude.
First, it's not a $10 purchase. He said $10-15/gallon which equates to $10-15/100 sq.ft. A roof on a 2000 sq ft house might be around 1000 sq if two-story or 2000 sq. ft. if one-story, which means $100-$150, or $200-$300, depending.
Second, I believe he may have been talking about the opportunity cost, not the cost of credit. If he spends $300 to paint his roof white, but he could have invested that $300 in a fund that earns 5% interest, then his true cost is more than $300, even if he pays cash.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
That's right! Don't you know that Bill Clinten is always WRONG about everything, always and forever?
Hm, so if we can get him to say, "I am wrong" then we should be able to take out the Alices and maybe even Norman himself...
Bow-ties are cool.
The sun's radiance is pretty weak at 3 um wavelengths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Spectrum.png.
It seems that you want high emissivity at IR, but very low in the visible spectrum to minimize surface temperature - which would imply white paint should be ideal.
If you want to lose weight, you don't do that by parking a few feet further from the building or taking a few flights of stairs, while you continue to stuff yourself.
Less calories in or more out gets you the same result. If you are going to stuff yourself anyway might as well park further away.
> I'd be more concerned... that he has an ulterior motive
Why? If you come out ahead, what do you care if somebody else profits too?
While your premise is true, it's at least valuable to determine cost as well. Even if the benefit is small if the cost is zero then it might be worth doing.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
How much are you paying for labor on this?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
This issue has long been known. Products have long existed which also double as a sealant, frequently extending the life of asphalt shingles. One of the biggest issues is many home owner associations specifically prevent changing the color of your roofing. I would argue HOAs which prevent painting your roof white should be on the hook for 20% of a home owner's utility bills.
The research on this topic is very clear. Conservatively, every roof which is painted white can easily save 10%-15%, whereby 20% should be obtainable on most roofs. Many report even larger savings.
When you buy into a subdivision with a HOA, you are told that fact up front -- no one makes you move into an area with a HOA. People choose to live with a HOA after they've experienced the Neighbor From Hell a time or two. The HOA is the lesser of the two evils.
Its colder in the winter because the sun is less of an issue anyways-- so heat gains wouldnt be that major. Further, its a lot more efficient to heat a house (just release energy!) than it is to cool a house.
There are many places in the U.S. that don't average much snowfall in the winter.
If you're far enough north(or south) then you get snow, so even a black roof is effectively white. White might actually be better for areas that get snow, because the mid-day sun would be less likely to warm up the shingles and cause some of the snow to melt, which would normally lead to ice-dams.
I suspect they would actually make the building warmer. It's a common misconception that black absorbs heat while white reflects it. Well, that in itself isn't the misconception, the misconception is that people think of the heat transfer happening only one way. Black is more conducive to heat transfer than white. That means if you have a black roof in winter (assume no snow), and the inside of the house is warmer than the outside, the black roof will radiate the interior heat to the sky faster than would a white roof. Think of white paint as a heat insulator, and black paint as a heat conductor.
True, during daylight the radiation from sunlight into the roof may exceed the radiation from inside the house to outside. But days are short in Winter, and I suspect the heat loss during the night far exceeds the gain during the day.
Wagner products might be worth looking into for you DIY types. Otherwise, just hire a roofing service company. It's safer for you, and they have more experience. Trust me, you don't want to fall down and break bones. At worst, you break your neck.
Life is not for the lazy.
-- 3m wavelength
I thought light, UV, visible, and IR had a fair bit shorter wavelength than that....
But in colder climates, the darker roof will help heat the house and melt that snow off of the roof. Have you ever cleared a section down to the darker color and watched what happened? I remember as a kid clearing the blacktop driveway. Exposing the darker color in the morning lead to large sections (around the exposed dark ones) being clear of all ice and snow.
So maybe Clinton's plan is to paint all roofs white in the Spring then paint them dark in the Fall?
Just before Christmas was had a massive hail storm (some as big as cricket balls) which actually damaged our Colorbond roof. Colorbond has a good reputation when it comes to hail, but it was over 20 years old. Solar cells had zero damage: we have both PV and hot water. In fact our insurance claim took longer because we had to wait for a solar contractor to disconnect the panels so the roofers could get underneath them. We did get a light colour for the roof, not quite white.
Oh, here in Gold Coast Australia, electricity is about 20c/kWh and they pay us about 50c/kWh on what we feed back into the grid from the solar. Some people actually make money doing that! And the cells cost me nothing - the government paid the $8k for cells and installation!
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
http://www.amesresearch.com/roof_coatings.htm
Yeah, a lot of people died because of that tsunami. A lot of people have died as a result of 9/11, and I'm not talking about the people in the towers or the planes. I'd argue that the world has, to a degree, generally become a shittier place for everyone living in it thanks to the actions of the US government in the wake of 9/11.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Not all of us get snow in the winter. Even those that do usually don't spend an entire winter with snow-covered roofs, depending on local climate.
Besides, doesn't snow act as an insulating layer?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
In Florida we usually throw small white gravel on the roof while the tar is still hot.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I think you're getting confused. What matters most is reflectivity, not emissivity. The solar spectrum is most intense in the visible part of the spectrum (no surprise - that's why our eyes evolved to be sensitive to that part of the spectrum), and white paint is much more reflective in that part of the spectrum than black paint (by definition - that's what it means to be white!).
And why are you quoting the emissivity of a particular paint at 3m wavelength? That's radio frequency. Solar energy in that frequency range is completely negligible compared to visible.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
And during those times when the sun is not hitting right on, a black surface will generally emit, you guessed it, more black-body radiation. (However, the real issue at hand then is the emission/(re)absorption properties in IR instead, but many black surfaces are black in IR and FIR as well, and the opposite holds for many white ones.) In short: staying black will not keep you warm, unless there is a lot of radiation around to absorb.
This will be sticky with a Democrat incumbent, but a leaderless one at that.
A roof is white in winter because of the snow. Said another way, we already have white roofs in cold climates in the winter because the snow makes the shingle color irrelevant.
That is not true. Unless you are in the arctic you don't have snow all winter, most people in the US only have snow on the roof for a very small portion of their winter. And when they do have snow it is quite different than white paint. While they both may reflect solar energy the snow actually acts as an insulator helping to trap heat in the home.
Warn them about the Tsunami
Yeah, but I can't *stop* that.
Besides I hate the Japanese people. Not for Pearl Harbor, or Nanking or any of that shit, mind you. I hate them for anime. That headache-inducing crap really turned the Cartoon Network into a godless wasteland. Well, except for Adult Swim of course. Someone has to pay.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
True but integrate the area under a solar radiance spectrum..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Spectrum.png
Visible is by no means low, in fact its the peak. BUT the numerical integral of IR looks way larger than the numerical integral of visible.
dark collectors help, because thats like getting an extra free 25% heat intake. But fussing around pre-existing roofs to lower heat intake by less than 25% is possibly not good engineering sense, if it causes problems, death rates due to roof work, leaks can be very expensive, etc. Given a choice of light or dark shingle, it seems the light is a no-brainer, but fussing around with paints on existing structures is not so certain.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
mod this man up, because he actually knows the answer, and explained it in a non-asshat way.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Yeah, make home owners associations illegal.
You mean to say that you don't think other human beings are smart enough to enter into contracts of their own choice when you think those agreements are not a good idea. How you got so smart that you can figure out what they can't is left unclear.
I could see some mandatory disclosures to help people make informed decisions, including having a neutral third-party explain exactly what they are getting into. I know I would never buy into a HOA property. I just can't stand the idea that because I don't like it then others shouldn't be able to chose differently -- it assumes far too much.
politicians. Top it off with zoning commissions and it will take a Federal Law similar to what had to be passed to permit people to install the small satellite dishes used by Dish and Direct.
I am more than willing to put shingles on my home if they reduce energy costs. I will say this, find a company which can achieve the same effect in a light brown/sand color and you have big bucks. I am quite sure there are some tricks out there to arrange the components of a shingle roof that would net many of the benefits of a white roof without being, well white.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Pollen, dirt, tree sap. Great idea, but after 5 years, how reflective "white" will a white roof be anymore?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
While you're up there on the roof, paint over those black solar panels that are such an eyesore.
That is a good point that I think most European's don't realize: In Europe, the weather is much more constant than the US. We have hail, tornadoes, wild swings in temperature from winter to summer. The Pilgrims had balls moving here, the weather would suck in the US if not for a good roof and central heat and air.
In much of Europe, there is no need for air conditioning. All you have to do is look at Minnesota today, heat index of 117, to realize they wouldn't like it here without A/C.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I'm confused, how does the other house not facing the street affect your house's value? I can think of a couple reasons why it would affect the value of that house (look out the front window and have a nice scenic view of... the side of your house), but nothing that should matter to someone looking to buy your house.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
It's the roads and roofs in urban areas where this matters on the aggregate. See urban island effect.
There is no reason that snow on the roof should melt any more than snow on the ground. Both are equally exposed to the sun. If snow is melting off of your roof, and not off of the ground, you might want to check your roof insulation because that snow melt is coming straight from your heating bill.
And having lived in Minnesota my entire life, I can say that your average roof truss can hold up quite a bit of snow weight. The only time I have seen a roof collapse due to snow weight was on a barn after a major ice storm, and even then, the only part that collapsed was shoddily constructed in the first place.
The Asphalt Shingle Association is already on it.
Lobbyist spew in 3...2...1...
Anyone else have any requests for shit for me to do while I'm in 2000?
Take this $10000 and loan it to Larry and Sergey. Tell 'em I'll take stock instead of money as repayment, once they get around to that IPO thing.
WALSTIB!
I've owned homes continuously since 1992. My first home had a shingle roof that went through Hurricane Andrew - when I sold in 2003 it was still watertight and showing no signs of needing replacement. The home we bought had a leaking roof when we bought it, during dry season (bonus points to the home inspector who said nothing about it) - we replaced that roof and ended up moving out of state a year later. Next home owned for 3 years with no roof problems, and we've been in our current one for 5 years with no problems here.
So, statistically, I've done my one roof replacement in 20 years, but as often as people move around in the post-Bush economy, it's more like a lottery than a certainty that you'll have roof problems as a homeowner.
Okay, I'll go back in time and have them build my house with those. I'll also make a plea to the homeowners association to allow this while I'm there and maybe stop 9-11 from happening. Anyone else have any requests for shit for me to do while I'm in 2000?
stop the robot apocalypse?
I would love to get the heat-reflectivity benefits of a white roof. Here in sunny So. Calif. the sun hitting the roof I would guess is the cause of at least 80% of AC use. My house has no AC because it's expensive and dries the air out uncomfortably, but we do struggle to keep the place cool on the hottest days, using a whole house fan for nighttime ventilation.
One basic problem is that on many homes, lightly colored roofs just don't look very good. Taste of course can't really be argued over, but I think most people will be averse to the look of even lightly colored gray or other shades, let alone the stark white that most of these roof paints come in. A gross generalization, perhaps, but in support of which, well, people can put whatever color roof they want on their buildings, and the fact is that darker browns, dark red tile, and even black are far more popular than white or any other very light shades.
So I would wonder if trying get people to do something they consider ugly is just going to be swimming against the tide and futile. Some people will be fine with white (especially where the roof is not visible.) But for everyone else, what are the alternatives? Would some kind of radiant block like a foil based underlayment, combined with better roof and attic insulation such as an inch of foam or something like that, be just as good? Maybe better - it would have the benefit of keeping wintertime heat in the building, where just a white roof added to your average poor insulation could well end up adding to the heating bill. (And yeah, most homes in So Cal have heaters too.) Who really cares how hot the roof is, isn't it the interior of the building that counts?
I live in Texas now, and when I moved here (from great lakes area), one of the first things I noticed is that every school bus had a white roof on it.
It makes perfect sense of course.
Then I noticed that ALL buses around here had white roofs, as well as cabs.
However, the flat roofs of large buildings, warehouses, business complexes, and big box stores and retail are, for the most part, not white. I have no idea why not.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
In South Africa a white roof makes a huge difference in summer. You can get away without AC. In winter roofs tend to get some kind of algae that make them darker. Unfortunately I don't know if they have a significant effect - perhaps someone on /. knows. Come summer time you have to blast them away again.
Wouldn't it be cool if there is some kind of paint that turns white when it gets hot and black when it gets cold?
Debatable.
It is possible to make very energy efficient homes that use almost no power to cool them.
This is basically to take your average Norwegian house, plop it down somewhere hot, slightly uprate the cooling system, and get some sort of shading over the windows.
The same applies in hot weather as cold.
Very good sealing, heat recovery ventilation.
Vapour barriers and heating controls do get more annoying when the habitable volume goes well above and below the environment.
The major difference is solar gain is now your enemy, not your friend, so you need to do things like put up shade (natural or otherwise) to stop the sun shining into the windows - overhanging construction, comparatively small windows (in both cases) ...
The one good thing the home in 117F has is an abundance of potential energy from solar.
Depends on the neighbor and the HOA.
My neighbors are great. We all mind our own business. No HOA. Of the lot of us, I AM the bad one.
BTW the very worst 'neighbor from hell' is a lawyer and also the president of the HOA.
Lets just say that choices are good and leave it at that.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
HOAs make one "neighbor from hell" into many "neighbors from hell".
Uniformity in housing is an appeal to create an aesthetic of order where it really doesn't exist. Life isn't tidy no matter how your dress it up.
I would think that reflectivity would dominate in this instance. Are you saying that black paint (LRV 5%) is less reflective than the average white paint (LRV 85%)? Or even black tar?
I was largely neglecting that, as climbing on my roof doesn't scare me.
And what about Albedo?... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo The point of being white is because of the reflected energy vs. absorbed. Only the absorbed component needs to be emitted.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
Maybe, as a politician, he spotted the fact that this is an old idea that is worth implementing (not unusual), and at this particular time him making a statement might just effectively drive greater adoption of the idea - something that you can't do because the mainstream press doesn't give a damn what you say. Perhaps he strategically timed it for (his perception) of maximum effect, or more likely it just "seemed like a good time."
Why would that be? My house has had the same roof for 80 years.
How in the world would having a white roof save me money????
I don't have air conditioning. If I want to cool my house down in the summer, I open my windows at night and close them in the morning. Of course I did spend CDN $3428.01 on home heating in 2010, but a white roof wouldn't help with that.
------- Mark
With HIS SPERM!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
A good A/C saving shingle is more than just white to the eye -- it has to have both good reflectivity as well as good emissivity, otherwise the roof will heat up like a tin roof. Odds are that a black shingle (again, it would need to be tested broad-band) has poor reflectivity but good emissivity. Hence a black shingle will radiate no more than a white shingle, but it will certainly absorb more. On balance, if you live in a cold climate, you may want to weigh the thermal gain of the black shingle over the cool roof effect of the white shingle.
The other thing is that according to Stefan-Boltzmann, the radiation effect goes as temperature to the 4th power, hence the emissivity of a shingle exposed to full summer sun on a hot day is important, the emissivity as a loss mechanism for the solar gain at winter surface temps, even when solar heated, less so.
Given that (1) Clinton is talking about flat (not pitched) roofs that are typically tar coated, and (2) there are paints specifically formulated for exactly this purpose that are black, white, or aluminized, I find the example you suggest of a standard Krylon paint is irrelevant.
For a highly reflectant surface, emissivity should be close to 0.
Infrared wavelengths don't quite get as large as 1 cm, so you're off by some orders of magnitude in the example. Not only that, the peak of insolation energy is right in the visible spectgrum, although there is a substantial amount tailing off down towards 2000 nm (that would be 2 um, or about six orders of magnitude off from your example). To a first approximation, the visible color of a pigment will give a reasonable prediction of its general reflectivity.
Blogging on a subject does not mean you are an expert, and in the few minutes it took me to research this response, I found vast amounts of information on the web regarding absorption and emissivity, and also roof coatings. Here's one that combines the two: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=roof_prods.pr_roof_emissivity
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Researched the heck out of it? I doubt it, yout get some basic facts completely wrong. 3m wavelenght is VHF = TV signals. You probably meant 3 micro meter = 3000 nano meter. At this waevlenght the sun emits less then 1% energy then at visible frequencies. Almost all energy is emitted as visible light or near infrarad (1400nm), so being white is a good indicator for total reflectivity of the paint.
Also, with the additional layer of paint and less temperature fluctuations in the upper layer your roof might last a few years longer.
Plant a god damn row of quick growing trees almost on the property line and quit your bitching. Don't use fruitless mulberrys, they suck.
It might also be a good time to put a car up on blocks in your front yard, just before he's ready to sell the house. You can borrow one of mine if you're in N. Cal.
I bet that anything built on that lot will actually improve your homes value.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A black roof doesn't help you heat a house if it is covered with white snow. And even the south, we spend more on heating than cooling...
And how many days does that roof "in the south" get covered in snow? Here in central Okla., snow - enough to cover roofs and stick - is rare, only a few days a year. Light covered roofs (or even galvanized tin like in the old days) would be ideal. That's why I chose tan for my new roof.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I can't believe how those Homeowners associations have proliferated so greatly, and why so many people out up with this.
I can see both sides of things.
left alone, many americans will exhibit EXTREMELY poor taste. this not only decreases property values but lowers your general happiness being around such trash (I'm talking about the neighbors, here).
otoh, most HOA's go too far.
in america, the hapbble middle-ground must have packed up and left. I have not seen mr. middle for a long time; maybe he died?
seriously, if left to their own devices, it will probably either go very nice or very slummy. once they go slummy, they almost never go back, either.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
People who buy into an HOA don't want an old house. Or don't want to buy land in BFE and build something.
In many major metros there is no such thing as new construction (and by new, lets say 10-15 years) that isn't in an HOA.
Thankfully my current HOA is fairly benign (well, except for providing very little for your money - at least the trash gets picked up). The last one wasn't and just chock full of little Napoleons.
I'm not so sure of your data. The linked site lists TiO2 paint separately with an emissivity of 0.9, but does not specify the wavelength (maybe they're using a graybody assumption?). However, if you look at the measured emissivity page, you see something quite different:
http://www.infrared-thermography.com/material-2.htm
"White paint" (no detail given) has a measured emissivity of 0.7 at a wavelength of 3.5 -- 4 mm. You're right that just because an object seems to have a low emissivity in the visible wavelengths doesn't mean it is similarly reflective for long waves. For sunlight, the maximum irradiance is around 500 nm at sea level and falls of exponentially for longer waves, reaching half strength by about 1200nm. If you want to reflect a lot of this energy, you want a material with a low emissivity in the near infrared.
The one good thing the home in 117F has is an abundance of potential energy from solar.
Not really. I mean, it does in the summer when it is actually sunny, but the vast majority of the year in Minnesota it is very cold, cloudy and dark far more of the day than it is light.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
yeah, he looks out of hi normal side windows, usually expecting NOT to see foot traffic and now his neighbor's front door is right there.
again, left to their devices, MOST people will exhibit poor taste.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
You live in a desert. Apparently with an outdoor pool. Anyone complaining about your choice of AC settings is splitting some interesting hairs.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
How long before we here the politicians whining that Clinton's trying to outlaw roof shingles or make everyone replace their roof.
Oh lordy, that was my first thought. Conservatives in particular don't take helpful lifestyle suggestions well, especially when it comes to conserving things. That's why Cheney told us to use all of the energy we could afford, and why it was such an outrage when Michelle Obama pointed out that we could avoid getting fat and sick by eating less junk. Well, gotta go... I'm headed out to buy me a boatload of incandescent bulbs, just to show 'em who's boss.
Growing up, I lived in a storey-and-a-half house. All of the upstairs rooms were halfway in the attic and part of the ceiling was sloped.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
We should put snow on our roofs in summers too. Global warming will be history :)
...what happens to all that reflected energy? It has to go somewhere. If the Sun's energy isn't heating up your building, it's going to heat up something else.
The most environmentally conservative way to cool a house is to bury it. No more man made products to buy to put on top of a house. No electricity needed. Everything we need to cool us down is under the ground.
temperature map
Tell yourself to stop being an asshat.
A smidge more than half of the energy from the sun reaching your roof is IR we can't see. Telling people to go out and simply buy white paint is not going to be nearly as effective as it could be.
You need to tell people to make sure the paint they get is IR reflective. This matters more than the visible color of the paint.
What was the temp diff if I may ask? Sounds like you gave it a shot and it is noticeable. 5 deg 10, 15? how much? Even 5 would be worth it I guess.
Why would asphalt shingles last longer in Europe than they do in America, or are you just talking about a different kind of roof than what this thread was talking about.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I've already got a residential sprinkler system in my house; the fire's probably out before the trucks get here.
Now the water damage, on the other hand...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
i recommend these nice things called trees - plant them on your side of the property line.. and let them grow.. soon you won't be able to see the neighbor..
either way shouldn't effect your property value.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Have you purchased a house? Did you do so without looking at the neighborhood it's a part of? Didn't consider sight lines both to and from the neighbors' houses? Generally speaking, a "peculiar" house will drive down the price of the houses nearby. "Flushed... down the toilet" in the GP post is probably an exaggeration, but there will be an effect.
Mod parent up!
I have cedar shingles - paint would be a BAD idea. Of course they are already naturally grey/silver in color - so there's nothing much to do here.
Indeed. The only HOA I'd ever enter into would be one that controls common areas like pools and roads.
That's reasonable to pay for. Hell, I don't even swim and I wouldn't mind that...it's a tiny extra amount of 'taxes', and compared to the actual cost of buying a house, $30 a month or whatever is nominal.
On my property, however, fuck off. I'm not agreeing to anything that lets the HOA say anything about my property.
And this is sad, because I can see an argument that perhaps people should be mandated to keep their lawn mowed and not keep cars on blocks in it, or who pays for fences, or how many cars you can keep on the street...but it's a very slippery slope and all HOAs immediately slide down it to regulating what color your shutters are.
The real problem, of course, is that absolutely no one cares about the HOA, so they end up with like five people actually operating them and making decisions, and those five people will just randomly dislike things and think it's reasonable to outlaw them. Often these people 'cannot handle change', and have some sort of actual mental illness.
I'd like to see HOAs start having much larger quorum requirements, or require a majority of everyone. If the HOA wants to ban something, 50%+ of the homeowners in it should have to agree to ban it, perhaps by petition posted in a common area. Not just 50%+ of the eight people who show up at meetings.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Also, waste heat from your house goes right into melting the snow.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
doesn't matter how much surface area is road, you can install heat-exchanger systems in carparks and heat (and cool) buildings directly from their own carparking.
That said, a study has said that if 15% of Holland's had such a system installed, it would produce more energy that all the power utilities do, combined. It also means that roads last longer as they wouldn't freeze so easily and therefore develop cracks and potholes, nor have to be covered with rock salt to de-ice them.
When I'm feeling like a fascist, I think we ought to have reverse handicapped license plates. Fat asses get remote parking. The fatter you are the further away from the buffet you have to park.
Then again, giving them all electric scooters so they die ASAP seems to be working. I bet electric scooter use hastens the spiral. Net cost savings.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Solar energy is absorbed mainly at visible frequencies, but emitted at the infra-red (thermal) frequencies. Frequency is not conserved, but energy. What you need is a coating that is most reflective at visible light while being reasonably emissive at the infra-red. White paint is nice, while tin or aluminium are not.
It's just like the opposite of the green-house effect.
Rodrigo
This is crap because white roof savings in the summer will be cancelled by 1) loss of "supplemental" heating from the sun in the winter 2) faster loss of heat during the nights and in the winter. The white body absorbs heat slower, but it also radiates more efficiently than a black body. So give me a break.
" If he spends $300 to paint his roof white, but he could have invested that $300 in a fund that earns 5% interest..."
He could have, but odds are he just bought more pizza, beer, and video games.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Unfortunately you just hit the spam button and just moved on with your life.
Don't say I didn't try!
Worse than a new house with an HOA is an old house in a historic district. You can't do anything without approval. Paint your house THIS color, roof your house with THESE shingles, plant only THESE plants, etc..
It's a total nightmare!
Oh, and the idea of every house having a white roof, that's utter nonsense. When Billy Boy does it, and all his crazy friends do it (including AL Gore!), then maybe, just maybe, we should consider it.
may be like, you know, insulating your house would, kinda, make the snow on top of it stay longer ?
In Old Europe, snow on roofs tends to stay almost as long as sow on lawns.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Here's a simple experiment to do in the summertime at any parking lot. Touch the hoods/trunks/roofs of white cars and black cars and feel the difference.
Ok, it's a conspiracy. Good one, though, huh?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Lots of considerations go into that question. What kind of climate is involved? Very different answers for New York City and Houston. Different answers for inner city versus outer suburb, based on the "heat island" effect. Different answers if the weather pattern is sunshine in the summer and cloudy in the winter, or vice versa. Also depends on the technology that get's used for heating or cooling. An old oil-fired furnace in a climate zone with cold winters is going to make for expensive heating. A high-efficiency heat pump in Seattle or Portland with cheap hydro power is going to do the necessary heating for a lot less money.
The big thing about the white roofs in an inner city where the "investment" is basically a coat of white paint is that the materials are cheap and no skilled labor is involved.
Efficiencies are all rolled into the price you pay. KISS.
Up-tread are lots of practical discussion, you know the kind of engineering that non-lawyers do before making recommendations for specific places.
Paint your roof white to save money is not a scientific claim. It is an engineering claim. Scientifically it's simple to say that white reflects visible light etc etc. From an engineering standpoint it is more difficult to say that white painted roofs will save money vs. the real world options.
In hot areas low albedo roofing has been standard for at least the life of a composite shingle roof. Not many black roofs visible.
Also are issues with snow melt etc explored up-thread. Ugly engineer type discussion.
I don't hate Clinton more then I hate all fucking lawyers.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ahem, you mean why god made our eyes to see that part of the spectrum. Don't forget that we have to placate all of Texas.
Not all.
You want a white roof when you life in the south, where heating in the winter isn't a big deal, but cooling in the summer is, so you want to make your cooling lower.
You want a dark roof when you life up north as its far more effective to help the heating than it is to worry about the few times during the summer when you need cooling.
And more importantly, recoating the roof for a multistory building is only going to have an effect on the upper floor, not those below it ... which aren't exposed to sunlight, so you won't get a 10-20% savings across the building, only on the upper floor. That doesn't mean its not worth doing, it almost certainly is if your roof color is the wrong one for where you live.
My point? Clintons ignorant simplistic view is a shining example of why you don't ever listen to advice from has-been politicians such as himself and his vice president.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Since his neighbors house is a large McMansion, his neighbors front or back windows will almost certainly look down into his yard. I know I wouldn't like to buy a house where my back yard feels like a prison compound.
What about those of us who live where it doesn't snow much, like Little Rock?
Just require the roofing material to be white. In 20 years all roofs are white not expensive paints and education programs needed.
IIRC, one of the reasons that traditional clay tile roofs have been around so long, particularly in warm climates, is that there is a continuous flow of air between the tiles and the underlayment due to natural convection. The tiles may get quite hot, but the air flow keeps most of that heat from reaching the rest of the building.
I have asphalt singles: I simply painted over them with Henry's 587 White Roof Coating: http://www.henry.com/roofing/coolroofcoatings/whiteroofcoatings/587whiteroofcoating
Works great. And it is TOTALLY worth it: My inside temp fell by 10-15 degrees after painting the roof. I wish I had done it the first day I bought the place instead of waiting 9 years. It has easily paid for itself.
I see below you mention having an HOA: You've screwed yourself. You get to pay both the HOA fees and higher air conditioning bills. Enjoy your home! :)
The rest of us should all run out and paint our roofs white. I'm surprised the electric company here isn't encouraging it: They already subsidize energy efficient light bulbs and appliances. We still occasionally have rolling blackouts here in San Diego. I live in what might be considered "east county" San Diego where it easily hits 100F regularly. It is currently 88F which is unusually cool.
They're talking about flat roofs, which you normally find in cities, on large buildings, and can't see from the street, not pitched roofs like you find on SFHs in the sub/exurbs.
For houses there are "high albedo" shingles in traditional colors that you can buy. They look fairly normal but reflect back a larger percentage of infrared insolation than a traditional asphalt shingle. Light grey also works better than black.
Nobody is really suggesting that you go painting a shingled roof white.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
They use a Dark Green to radiate heat from Power transformers. This is because of it's high emissivity. The Visible color is irrelivant.
My krylon example is to show that the wrong "White" Paint could be actually worse then no paint at all.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Have you ever been on the top of a mountain covered in snow on a bright sunny day? Bright doesn't even come close. Now just imagine being in a NY penthouse lookig down at city full of buildings all with white roofs. All of them reflecting light and UV rays right back up into the sky - blinding your view of the city.
That said, painting a roof white does help with energy cost. We have 2 buildings in the South East that we have done this on and both have seen a drop in energy cost. The down side though, you can't even think of walking on them during the day without some form of eye protection. My point? Before we start paitning all of the roofs white we need to stop and think about a way of doing so without causing more problems, because in the end trading one problem for another is still a problem.
Zony
Jesse Jackson say?
He was using the symbol m vs the symbol for micron or micrometre. That is why it looked like he was measuring the wavelength in meters vs microns.
The site he was referring to is http://www.infrared-thermography.com/material-1.htm
They could have at least used um vs just m to be more clear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrometre
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
That's a reason for zoning and ordinances, not HOA. And if you can prove his actions lowered your property value, sue him. Otherwise, you are just a whiner that should have joined a HOA so you could bitch about everyone else you don't like. And no, lowering your enjoyment of your property isn't "flushing the value of your house down the toilet." It the market value is similar, then it didn't have the effect you assert. And if it did, then it should be provable, and you could sue.
Oh yeah I'm such a bore, but not to worry: If you give me a few hundred dollars, I'll guarantee not to hang out with you. If you take this excellent deal, all you lose is the pointless option of spending those hundreds of dollars on something else. It's practically a steal!
In Europe they tend to be slates or tiles. The slates on my home are probably the same ones that were there 100 years ago. They'll have been relaid a time or two, but the same slates will have been reused.
But fussing around pre-existing roofs to lower heat intake by less than 25% is possibly not good engineering sense, if it causes problems, death rates due to roof work, leaks can be very expensive, etc. Given a choice of light or dark shingle, it seems the light is a no-brainer, but fussing around with paints on existing structures is not so certain.
First of all, slapping paint on a flat roof is probably the easiest roofing work you can possibly do. You don't have to be "fussy" at all. Roofs need to be maintained regularly anyhow, I wouldn't consider this "fussing" with the roof.
Secondly, 25% is HUGE. Even if you're only referring to this as a fraction of absorbed solar light, a 25% reduction in the summer would be enormous savings in cooling bills and energy expenditure. Eyeballing the solar spectral density, the visible range of the spectrum looks like it accounts for about half of the total irradiance, so we're probably talking about a larger than 25% reduction in solar absorption.
In Alaska, the roofs are covered with snow for months at a time. We clear the roofs if the snow gets more than 3 feet thick to prevent problems, but most times nobody clears their roofs, and the snow sits there for the entire season. You need to learn how to make a roof that doesn't fall down when a little snow lands on it.
Learn to love Alaska
Like that'd help. Go tell Japan about Fukishima. Go tell the US there were not WMDs in Iraq. I don't think anyone would listen to anyone about such things. At least with 9/11, you could call in a bomb threat to the two towers at 8:00 a.m. and get them cleared out, regardless of whether anyone listed about the hijacking plot.
Learn to love Alaska
It hardly makes a difference. Take a look at the solar spectrum. That graph only goes up to about 2.5 um, at which point the energy is already pretty insignificant. At 3 um it's even lower.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Since black is also the best emitter as well. (IE it'll let the heat out of the building better than white.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Ah, the illusion of choice.
They're not "of their own choice" if there isn't a ready choice. If all the homes for sale of a particular kind in a particular area are all HOA, then people who don't want a HOA will end up being in one against their will.
In Old Europe, snow on roofs tends to stay almost as long as sow on lawns.
Lazy Europeans, just shoo the pigs away!
Required reading for internet skeptics
I live in Portland... what the hell is this "snow" stuff you keep talking about? Oh, and the guys down in Los Angeles and Phoenix called and asked the same thing...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Having a 1.5 storey house doesn't mean the rooms are in the attic; it means you don't have an attic. It's the same situation as with flat roofs or vaulted ceilings.
"Attic" connotes unconditioned space, i.e., outside the insulation.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I know someone is asking about the blacks? I'm sure someone is gonna be pissed.
A black roof actually radiates heat more readily than a white one, so if it is cold and dark out the white roof will actually keep you warmer.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Ideally, you want a surface which is highly reflective at visible wavelengths (so that it reflects the incoming sunlight) and highly emissive at infrared wavelengths (so that it reradiates any absorbed heat efficiently). The emissivity at 3m wavelength is still completely irrelevant, though.
KingArthur: So you are saying houses in Cold Climates should have Black Shingles to help direct sunlight to melt the snow,
while houses in Hot Climates should have White Shingles to help avert direct sunlight to prevent the planet surface from causing global warming?
ROBOT256: yes.
KingArthur: how would this effect the roosting of swallows?
ROBOT256: durring what season?
KingArthur: May...
Climbing on the roof doesn't scare me. Hitting the ground or sharp things between the roof and the ground after falling from the roof does kind of scare me.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I'd love to hear a story of anyone who has gotten to the table at the title office with the contract ready to go and money in the title account, and then made an issue out of a HoA -- either in the form of being made exempt, or simply walking away from the deal. I think it would be fun to do that. Insist that it is very much in the seller's ability to make the deed exempt from any encumbrances of that sort, and to do it in the form of a deed restriction so that it is forever exempt. With the value proposition for them taking that step being that you are now walking away from an otherwise closed deal.
Not many people get to that point in a real estate deal prepared to walk away for *any* reason.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Be ready to buy with cash, and make it a stipulation that you will be placed on the HoA board of directors, or you and your cash deal walk away. You won't get a seat on the board but I'll bet you can get yourself exempted.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Should you also have a black external water heater on your roof? I remember one town in my home country (tropical, so no seasons) had these large water tanks that were used also as water heaters using refraction, so the actual water heater wouldn't had to do much work.
I'm trying to picture that in a place with seasons.
Most people end up getting into real estate deals in a state of compromise and under severe duress. A lot of bad decisions get made.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"Soon" has different meanings in terms of "tree growth" that what we usually think of as "soon".
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I've got only one question:
What are the colors of the roofs on Clinton's various properties?
Liberty.
Well, I doubt they are "against their will" in any legally meaningful sense. You do sign a contract when you make the purchase, and it's normally part of a deed restriction. What I wish more people would try to do would be to get to the table and then get to a point in the negotiation (all contracts ready to sign, money is in the escrow account, the transaction is for cash, etc.), where the one sticking point is that the selling party needs to strike this HoA covenant. I would go as far as to say that if they _can't_ do that, the property isn't actually theirs to sell. I wonder if anyone has ever walked away from an otherwise closed real estate deal on the basis of not being exempted from an HoA.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Wouldn't it also increase heating costs in winter???
There are many arid places in the U.S. that have the extreme cold in the winter without very much snow so the color of the roof would factor in. When we are lucky enough to have snow on our roof in the winter, our heating bill goes down due to the insulating effect of the snow. Still, I would rather pay for more heating than more cooling so I think that a white roof might be nice if somewhat ugly. Our roof (and most others in our neighborhood) is brown.
If you have any pigeons left over, google might be interested: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Indeed - hence fall arrest stuff.
After all, he lived in a white house for a few years.
And tell the U.S. what a tits-up unmitigated disaster W would be as president.
I tried that already.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It would help if you weren't completely, utterly, and absolutely wrong.
"For most materials absorption and emissivity of IR is usually the same for a given frequency"
Of course it is, find a material that doesn't have the same emissivity and 'absorption' at a given frequency and you can build a heat engine that violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What you call "Selective Coatings" is pretty much every material. You need a coating that is tuned for the application, white paint happens to be the cheapest material that satisfies this.
Paint usually has a high emissivity in the IR (because of its composition, and because Burnt Magnolia-Bronze sells better than Cold Super-IR Deluxe) , but you also need to be concerned about the VISIBLE (and UV) albedo (1-emissivity). To save energy in the summer, you want a high VIS/UV albedo or a low emissivity, but unless your roof is emitting at about about 150F you can ignore the emission and concentrate on reflecting the sunlight with high albedo (probably white or silver) paint. If you can find a very well optically-tuned 'selective coating' you might get even get a factor of 2 better performance, but going from black (albedo 0.9) gives you an order of magnitude change in net solar radiation.
In the winter, you would like to emit as little as possible heat, so low emissivity paint is good, However, if snow/rain/leaves are covering your roof your low emissivity paint wont help, nor will your selective coatings. You need insulation with a high R value (low heat loss). As an added benefit, the insulation will reduce the heat inflow during the summer, reducing your cooling bill along the way.
It needs to reflect infrared light not visible light.
It might also be a good time to put a car up on blocks in your front yard, just before he's ready to sell the house.
Dressing like a pimp will help, too.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You're under a Homeowners Association? You poor, poor bastard. Those things are the very antithesis of "a man's home is his castle".
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole basis for the energy savings of a white roof appears to be in the assumed savings from running your air conditioner. If you don't _have_ an air conditioner, said savings is Jack ^ Squat. I don't have one, but I do have central heating, and live in a place where my roof isn't usually covered with snow. Seems to me the darker the better, as far as energy use goes.
Painting your air-conditionerless roof white might still make sense; if you _wish_ you had an air conditioner, it might make you more comfortable. But it won't save you energy.
well the start size is dependent on what you are willing to spend to have them put in..
and given the houseing market and concern on price - you shouldn't plan on selling in the next 3-5 years there's time to let them grow
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I think you don't know what you're talking about much less being confused. Emissivity defines reflectivity, as in an objects emissivity rate is it's effective reflection rate for a particular wavelength at a particular temperature, etc. etc.
Also, the solar spectrum is not most intense at the visible part. To quote Wikipedia, who has a source.
"Sunlight at zenith provides an irradiance of just over 1 kilowatt per square meter at sea level. Of this energy, 527 watts is infrared radiation, 445 watts is visible light, and 32 watts is ultraviolet radiation.[2]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
The numbers Mr. Sokol is repeating are for micrometers, per the site he references. Note the name of the site. Only one page of the measurements has the micro symbol, probably because the author didn't save the first two pages properly from Excel or what not.
And his point stands. Painting a visible white is only taking care of a small portion of the heat creating wavelengths.
Furthermore, and conveniently ignored, is the fact that above a certain latitude more energy is expended heating in the winter than cooling in the summer. New York City and Chicago are above that latitude, which is around 38-42 degrees on the East Coast depending on the year's average solar irradiance but varies widely across the country (because of airflow and humidity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation
Or the fact that air conditioning was never a major concern for energy conservation, since the vast majority of energy used in buildings are to heat it, not cool it.
http://www.eia.gov/kids/energy.cfm?page=us_energy_homes-basics
But let's ballpark these at $3/W.
In sunny Scotland, I pay $.25/kWh of power.
A 1kW panel produces around 900kWh/year of electricity.
( http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/apps4/pvest.php)
At current prices, this 1kW panel would produce $225/year, or payback (neglecting interest!!!) in 6 years.
I love PV, and I have a 5 kW system to prove it, but misleading analyses like this one are a disservice.
Your hypothetical 1kW system costs $3000 at your own hypothetical $3/W. Generating $225/year would pay off in 13.3 years, not 6 but it's important to include interest, because at 5%, that changes your amortized payoff time to 22 years.
"Payback time" is a poor way to assess an investment, anyway--better to use annualized ROI, like we use for practically every other investment vehicle. Mine works out to about a (tax-free) 9% annual return. Yours works out to 7.5% (or a lot less, depending on how you account for the interest for the first 30 years). I don't know about your tax structure.
Australia has extreme weather ie hot/cold and huge storms and floods but if you visit Queensland you will notice 1 in 5 homes in the suburbs has a solar array now (1 in 3 were my relatives live). My relatives live in Queensland and have 1 solar array for power and another for hot water, their bills went from $430 per 1/4 to $180 and it was virtually free thanks to the government (state and federal).
Sheesh.
People in Florida have been painting many roofs white for decades for just this reason. My parents house in Ft. Lauderdale had a white roof from the 1950s on until they sold it.
Albedo of the planet (and everything on it) was talked about in Physics in the 80s (and probably long before) in terms of keeping the planet warm if there was a new ice age or nuclear winter or whatever.
It isn't new. BUT if it helps people reduce their power bills and become more efficient, then whomever says it should be applauded.
They might not even hurt in the winter. Black objects tend to radiate heat more then white ones. It all depends on the material in question, but you cannot assume that you will lose energy with white in the winter.
I live in Maine. In the summer, we open the windows for the breeze, and on really hot days, we use ceiling fans. The trees have leaves in the summer, and create shade. We put umbrellas on the deck, and they keep out the hot summer sun. In the winter, the leaves are off the trees, and we get lots of solar warming on sunny days. My roof is medium gray, and
As far as the argument about paint color - go barefoot and decide if you want to walk on the black asphalt or white lines of a zebra crossing. If you live anyplace where you use a lot of A/C, paint your roof white.
Isn't that what got Clinton in all the trouble?
Reverse Gore vs Bush? With an intelligent president and Bush lurking around Texas with the goatee, we'd have been doubly safe. Until Bush invaded Mars to save Earth from global warming. But hey, we'd have gotten to Mars, so, still win win?
and it was virtually free thanks to the government (state and federal).
They pay taxes, right? Sorry, but that is one of those things that grinds on me. When the government gives someone something, it isn't "free", it is paid for by everyone. That leads to waste and items being expensive (if you aren't paying, you don't care about the price...).
Other than that, that is a good thing. Australia is a more sunny place than most of the US, however. Southern California, Arizona and Nevada, for instance, have many more homes with solar power than in New Jersey or Delaware.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Clinton is onto something. I think also our massive amounts of concrete are contributing to a warming effect as well. Concrete will set and sizzle in the heat of day and retain plenty of heat into the night, releasing it, producing heat when things should be cooling. I have noticed in my town, I can take a quick drive out to the country and the temperature is lower once I get outside of town. I always thought it was because my town sets on the gate to Hell, and we are all living there so we don't have to go far when we die.
But consider all the elements of mankind that contribute to a heat burden, it has to add up.
Now the paranoid part of me thinks about all the roofs painted white as making them easy to target from above! Is Bill helping out his Chinese buddies with perhaps making easier targets of us all when they want to blast us from above? Its hard for me to listen to anything Bill has to say considering I think he is the biggest traitor to America in our history in regards to his Chinese involvements. His bullshit was easily forgot when Bush got behind the wheel and mashed the gas pedal to the floorboard, driving us off another cliff. At least it was a step in another direction, right? (wrong)
All in all, I have to say "Fuck you, Bill" and chock this one up with "duct tape and plastic" as some of the stupidest suggestions in the long history of stupidity coming forth from officials.
Take the Red Pill.
Spending money does not equal economic growth, producing more than consuming does.
Another thing i don't agree with is the government telling people where to spend money, if the market proves that painting your roof white will be more cost efficient then the market will do it naturally. When governments try to shift the market they create distortions and that's where the bubbles come from.
I wouldn't trust one word that comes out of this mans mouth.
The Newspapers in Arkansas coined the phrase "slick willie" for a reason.
In the old west, he would have been called a traveling salesman, who comes
through, makes a quick buck, then leaves so he isn't taken out and lynched.
Until Barrack Hussein Obama came around, you had Jimmy Carter & slick willie
as the worst presidents ever.
$30 a month? I don't own a townhouse, but I think near $200/month is "cheap".
The one good thing the home in 117F has is an abundance of potential energy from solar.
Sunlight isn't what kicks the heat index up really high -- it's humidity, which can definitely happen with heavy cloud cover or at night.
Posting from the shores of Superior.
I live in Minnesota. It is 97 degrees and humid today and I have my AC blasting away to a comfortable internal temperature of 72, where it is always set. We have cheap electricity in MN because of frack gas. A white roof would hurt my property values. Besides, my attic is so well insulated that a light roof wouldn't make much difference. I am not much interested in listening to the nanny state feds advice about lighting either. I have stockpiled a 10 year supply of incandescent bulbs.
an ill wind that blows no good
I do this demonstration for a bunch of kids every year:
Take two soda cans or other containers, paint one white, paint one black. Fill them with the same measured amount of water. Put a thermometer in each one. Then, set the cans out side in direct sunlight. After a while, the water in the black can will be significantly warmer than that in the white can. Simple. It works. That's why my work building has a white roof. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. But it is easy to show the effect scientifically. ;)
Only problem is, solar panels degrade over time. After 6 years you'll be lucky to get 50% the output of what you started with.
In other words, they're still not even remotely cost effective.
I think all Clinton was saying was : Coat as much as you can with thick, white liquid.
Warn them about the earthquakes and tsunamis, you insensitive clod!
But where are you getting 5% these days? 1% is more like it.
But the bulk of the energy in sunlight is in the visible spectrum anyway, so complaining about IR when the incident energy isn't IR seems like an attempt at dodging the argument..
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Solar_Spectrum.png
the tail on that radiation doesn't even go out to 3000 nm, or 3e-6 meters, let alone 3 meters, so talking about that kind of infrared seems irrelevant.
Well, actually white roofs reflect more light in the visible light range that greenhouse gases don't capture rather than absorbing the incoming solar radiation and re-radiating it in the infrared range that greenhouse gases do capture. So the more a roof reflects visible light the more it helps the global warming problem.
Without HOA who is going to keep out the scary minorities?
Think again.
Wind power, solar energy, everything without side effect?
Sorry - you're right - I was using the numbers I'd used for my own panels, which don't work with the above, hence my bogon detector diddn't go off.
Nevertheless - in some cases, where you can make simple frameworks and place them on the ground, on land you already own, you can get payback in 6 years.
This is only the case if you are willing to DIY a large fraction of the system, or it can attract subsidy.
Which is where the sealing, and the heat recovery ventilation kick in.
Typical panels come with guarantees of >80% at 20 years.
Depends on your definition, I guess. Some places refer to the space found directly below the pitched roof of a house as the attic (ie, anything between the rafters). Judging by the statement that only part of the ceiling was sloped, I'm guessing that there was actually a small attic space of the "above the insulation but beneath the roof" kind.
What about the simple implications that paining every roof white would lead to an increase in global warming? If the rays aren't being absorbed by the black paint, they must be bounced back into the atmosphere and this clearly must attribute to the rising temperature of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions... did anyone take a second to think about this?
Just about every new housing development has some kind of HOA from the start. In a lot of places, it's hard to find homes without HOAs.
Less calories in or more out gets you the same result.
Why yes, I'm carbing up for that marathon I plan to run in 10 years.
Whaddya mean it doesn't work that way? It's all calories in, calories out!
Well, it's a nice break from paining Miss Lewinsky white...
As cool as that would be, I don't think it would even be possible.
pff...we have been doing this in the Aegean Islands for millenia now. It's good America is catching up...
Lesson one: end users should be financially responsible for carbon generating activities.
To pick a nit, nothing an end user does "generates" "carbon".
highly powerful A/C units are way too cheap and easy to install - you can buy a unit for less than 45 days' energy cost. People need to be educated on the true cost of ownership of these things (and portable electric heaters, too.)
That's called freedom and you're complaining about it.
It's that kind of thinking that leads to climate change skepticism, proponents are far too quick to complain that other people have too much freedom to live however they want.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
But would it look good...?
I think the point of painting the roof white is to reflect the visible light that makes up most of the Sun's incoming radiation. By reflecting it in the visible range it goes back out of the atmosphere with little energy being absorbed at all. So I didn't check your links but did you investigate the reflectivity of the paint relative to the Sun's total incoming radiation spectrum or just in the IR range?
I agree that the emissivity at 3 meters isn't important here, but there is a very important point that is contained in John Sokol's post: the emissivity in the visible (where the majority of the solar power lies) and in the infrared (where the 300 Kelvin object will re-radiate) are BOTH important if you want to keep objects cool in the sunlight.
I don't understand your distinction between reflectivity and emissivity (fundamental physics links the ability to emit to the ability to absorb), but what you want for keeping roofs cool in the summer is something with low emissivity in the visible, and high emissivity in the infrared.
You may have noticed that, left out in the sun, most objects that have been painted white are cooler to the touch than most reflective metal objects. They are both good at not absorbing much solar radiation (due to low emissivity in the visible), but white paint will often have high emissivity in the IR making it good at cooling itself through radiation. Shiny metal objects typically have low emissivity in the IR, so they're not so good at cooling themselves through radiation.
His "m" is intended to mean "micron" instead of meters. The Mu symbol probably just didn't cut and paste correctly from the table linked to on his blog.
Original Table: http://www.infrared-thermography.com/material-1.htm
Also, via wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity
"In general, the duller and blacker a material is, the closer its emissivity is to 1. The more reflective a material is, the lower its emissivity. Highly polished silver has an emissivity of about 0.02."
Not saying I agree with the conclusion, but the OP's point wasn't as quite as obtuse as it appeared...
i've been thinking this for 15 years
Basically, even with numerous submissions of white papers to EPA and their various subsidiaries, I couldn't get any attention to it. However, you don't want to use paint. You want to use polypropylene. It address the concerns of the people above when it comes to the cold, because it's also an insulator. The main concern about using it on a large scale, and the reason RMI turned it down, is that it's hard to determine when or if the additional white space and savings on heating and cooling energy usage would offset the pollution generated by producing the material. I don't have the resources to pursue this experiment independently, but I do believe we desperately need the white space. I'm just glad someone everyone has heard of is promoting the concept.
Let me just say I live in a mostly hot place, I painted my roof white a couple years ago, and I can't believe how much cooler it is in my house. If you live in a hot place, just do it. If you live in Labrador, maybe not.
Please actually figure out how much money we're talking about. The "opportunity cost" is small enough so as to be negligible.
A micron and a meter is a million times different! Why did that website use m for microns? Look at how much time this has already wasted!
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Have you purchased a house?
I have.
Did you do so without looking at the neighborhood it's a part of?
Of course not. But a sideways facing house next to mine kinda seems like a weird thing to care about. Maybe I'd feel differently if I actually saw such a thing in person.
Didn't consider sight lines both to and from the neighbors' houses?
Honestly, no, I didn't. My one neighbor is about a floor's height below me in elevation, while my other is about half a floor above. All 3 are two-story houses. And that's ok with me. If the problem is them looking in, there are plenty of things I can do to block that.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
I don't have any way to check that, but the visible white component of the sun's light doesn't carry much heat.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
My engineering friend did a final year project on that. Having some plants (I forgot what kind, but they are all grass tall) will be much better. I remember there is an optimal height for plant to be able to lock moisture, and the leaves must be able to cover the soil. Of course you have to water them. This way not only are you dissipating heat, you also reduce greenhouse gas.
Ah, the illusion of choice.
They're not "of their own choice" if there isn't a ready choice. If all the homes for sale of a particular kind in a particular area are all HOA, then people who don't want a HOA will end up being in one against their will.
If all the homes for sale are HOA and the people actually want non-HOA houses, the first developer to offer a non-HOA house will make huge bucks. Developers aren't going to leave money on the table like that. You have a problem that you cannot believe others have a different preference than yours -- that people like HOAs (the majority of them, not the vocal minority) and will actually pay more for a house governed by an HOA.
The only illusion here is yours -- thinking that you know better than everyone else what they actually want. I hope that no one takes that attitude with you and what you want (although it would be sort of ironically just).
The visible component of the Sun's light that gets absorbed rather than reflected gets converted to heat and is re-radiated mostly in the IR band. White roofs reflect more and absorb less and the reflected light in the visible range mostly just leaves the atmosphere without interacting with anything.
Second, I believe he may have been talking about the opportunity cost, not the cost of credit. If he spends $300 to paint his roof white, but he could have invested that $300 in a fund that earns 5% interest, then his true cost is more than $300, even if he pays cash.
You also need to factor in the tax savings. He needs to pay income tax on that 5% interest income, while the savings in cooling costs are essential tax-free - thus effectively reducing that 5% income by whatever his tax bracket it. vlm above says he figures it is about a four year payback, which is roughly equivalent to a 25% rate of return. It is not very easy to find such low risk investments paying 25%.
It would seem like there would be an opportunity for someone to start an investment fund where they collect a bunch of money from investors, paint a bunch of roofs for people, and then collect something like half of the money saved on cooling from the roofowners to pay off the investors' investments and profits. Heck, I think there are a few utilities doing that sort of thing with energy efficiency retrofit loans - the payments come out of the energy savings.
You crazy americans and your cardboard houses!
In Australia the standard is either clay/concrete tiles, or colourbond steel (painted corugated zincalume) - both of which last 20+ years with minimal maintenance.
He's gonna pain the town red, and paint your roof white... Oh, and possibly someone's wife.
No don't mod him up, he's just a confident idiot that doesn't understand it's all about heat transfer in daylight and keeping the heat from getting in to start with. He's got the basics of simple heat transfer but got a bit mixed up.
Dark terracotta is another colour that is almost as good as black at absorbing heat from sunlight due to the range of frequencies that make it to the ground. I've noticed a dramatic difference in a house with a tiled roof after it was painted white, paticularly up in the ceiling space. That was in the subtropics where the benfit was obvious and immediately noticable - furthur from the equator it won't be so much of a gain.
White will make the roof marginally cooler in the winter. But the temperature difference between roof and the environment is greater in the winter, so the heat of the sun is lost quicker and the roof temperature cannot rise as much in the winter as it will in the summer. Of course, YYMV depending on the local climate. Also, as other poster have pointed out, there are fewer hours of sun in the winter, so the heating available from the sun is less in the winter.
Bubba saw that we need jobs. That's what this is about. Yes, he wants us to save money, but he's looking for things which create JOBS. He's talking about this now because we have a really bad unemployment problem.
He expects a frenzy of roof painting to put thousands of people to work and at the same time kickstart an industry which does the obvious things necessary to save people money on heating and cooling -- stuff with a payback of less than a year. The white roof work can pay itself back in a MONTH. He's not going all green right now because he's Al Gore. He's just using it with an aim to dampen the Runaway Unemployment.
Bill's a very smart boy.
The solar spectrum is not the most intense at the visible part of the spectrum, it's actually slightly more powerful in the infrared part of the spectrum. Infrared is what we should be doing our best to reflect, it's the part of the spectrum which actually heats objects up the most.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared#Heating
I'm thinking something like road paint would be excellent for this. We already make it, its very reflective and weather proof.
Wouldn't it be cool if there is some kind of paint that turns white when it gets hot and black when it gets cold?
There is, I looked into it a few years ago. Thermochromatic roofs are very expensive, but about to come off-patent in a few years.
All the people who believe in AGW should pool their money and buy the patents outright - IIRC it was a small Canadian roofing manufacturer who owned it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Said another way, we already have white roofs in cold climates in the winter because the snow makes the shingle color irrelevant.
A dirty little secret of the Global Warming debate is that in Northern climates it would make more sense to completely deforest the land, for the increased albedo reflectivity of the snowfall, than to allow those forests to continue to grow to absorb a small amount of carbon.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Keep black shingles?
Yes lets paint all roofs white. That won't have any negative consequences.
In Australia, lots of local building codes specify the permissible roof colours, with light to medium gray being the lightest available. Otherwise you get too many glare problems, as not all houses are the same height. Otherwise a two storey house will be looking down on a light coloured roof, and their cooling bills will actually go up, as they now cop the heat reflected off their neighbours roofs.
And why are you quoting the emissivity of a particular paint at 3m wavelength? That's radio frequency. Solar energy in that frequency range is completely negligible compared to visible.
That's 3 microns, not 3 meters.
Citation needed.
Wrong. Take a look at the spectrum and see for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_Spectrum.png.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
This is why car radiators and most heat exchangers are painted black. They EMIT heat better. In the case of radiators, you always know they will be hotter than the surroundings so black is the correct color to choose. When an item may either be tasked to either emit or absorb heat, the choice of color is not straightforward as has been pointed out. Black colors may absorb more heat but they also emit more. There is no free lunch; you can't have one without the other. If it were true that black absorbed heat more than white, and not also true that heat emits heat better than white, it would be possible to make a perpetual motion machine just by sticking a black panel and white panel next to each other and putting a heat engine between them.
As long as they have a good song..
Try again:
http://pvcdrom.pveducation.org/SUNLIGHT/SPECIRR.HTM
Look at the *entire spectrum this time* -- The visible spectrum is just a small portion of the overall spectrum hitting the earth. The energy over the wider spectum produces more energy when accounting for the entire spectrum.
"So weirdly enough this one specific "Visibly" white paint has one of the highest emissivities, and would absorb and reflect a lot of heat almost the same as the black paints!!!"
Perfect - a paint that reflects visible light (most of what we get from the sun) and also radiates in the IR very well (any heat that has already been absorbed).
Including nice... cool... Radon. Mmmm, good! (NE USA) And it's *awesome* when the water in the ground freezes and causes the ground surrounding (and perhaps above) the home to heave and thrust with a huge amount of force. And groundwater in general is always fun, especially when it runs into your living room from the mid-height of the wall. And dealing with water drainage issues when you're below ground, that's good too -- pump up (and deal with the runoff from your system when it comes back down) or really deep sewer systems, hmmm, which contractor will hurt you the most? Escape from fire... better have a good plan. Garages too.
OTOH, lay some pipe deep before you build, pump some fluid through it, and sink some of the houses's heat into the ground. Much more practical, and not very expensive as these things go -- if you have the cubic yardage to lay enough pipe (that's what she said. Er.)
Unless, of course, you're in tornado alley, in which case underground looks better and better.
[runs away, drooling]
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Remember to look at the RED spectrum. That's the one that you actually get on the ground. Also, it's highly unlikely that paint is highly absorptive uniformly across the IR.
Myth perpetuated by HOA's and those that feel empowered by being in one. I've owned and lived in areas with and without and HOA. Neither was better than the other. Sure, your mental case old man neighbor can horde cars and junk and but normally city/county laws will take care of most things like that. If you live in an area where your 2500+ sq ft house is on a 1/4 or a 1/5 acre of land and you can hear your neighbor making dinner from your own kitchen, that's you own damn fault.
HOA's complain about a flag pole, the type of garage door you have and hours you can leave it open, where the numbers have to be placed on your house, the type and quantity of trees, shrubs, the material your deck can be made from and how big it can be, if you can have a basketball hoop in your driveway etc.. Not a single one of those things (and many more restrictions) will lower the value of your own house and sure as hell not lower the entire neighborhood.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest you haven't thought this brilliant, cunning plan through.
Hint: It's not just about carbon dioxide.
Billy is welcome to come to my house and repaint and/or wash it every six months too.
"In cold weather... white is the wrong color. Black is the right color."
Not correct. White absorbs less and white radiates less. White is the correct color in both summer and winter.
The problem is about creating jobs in the economy and not about roof paint.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
I've priced this out for our condominium association and found that painting the roof white costs several thousand dollars per (rather small) unit - not worthwhile for the association certainly. That would pay the gas and electric bill for more than a year in most cases.
And the reflectance drops 75% in 3 years, so you'll soon be doing it again.
I had a job working for a roofing contractor during the summers 1987 & 1988. We tore off the tar surface and sprayed a layer of polyurethane foam with another layer of white rubbery top coat to seal it from the elements. The tar was often several inches thick and digging it up was a dirty nasty job. The temps on the roof was often over 100F and one could feel the heat coming up through your boots. One of the jobs was replacing the roof on a funeral home. When we started, the roof mounted A/C units were running 24/7. When we finished a couple days later, they would run about 25% of them time with the same weather conditions. The foam helped a lot, but even when it was scraped down to the bare wood that was under all the tar, one could certainly tell the A/C units were running less.
I like my skin and FUCK YOU BILL CLINTON.
William James Clinton is a fucking dog dick sucking pervert.
--//
The majority of the houses in the Greek islands are whitewashed to reflect the summer heat. They have been doing this since the bronze age.
Painting things white was a major part of his political platform.
And the cells cost me nothing - the government paid the $8k for cells and installation
No, you paid for those too...
Sapere aude!
Perhaps Mr. Bill will speak to my Home Owners Association about their restrictions.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yeah, paint the Roof of Monica's mouth white....
Yeah, that didn't work very well for Saruman either.
And your point is?
What I said was, "The solar spectrum is most intense in the visible part of the spectrum." And that is completely and totally correct. The fact that it's only a small part of the spectrum does not change the fact that the maximum solar intensity is right in the middle of that part.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
How about everyone in the world stopped using sloped roofs and started using flat roofs. Then we could all setup hydroponics on roofs and grow commodity vegetables. Once you get past the learning curve it's actually quite minimal work. Then looking down from planes all we would see is green buildings.
Hydroponics is mostly commodity materials and custom made so there is plenty of work. In colder areas which is most of the world we would enclose the roofs in glass for hot houses and vent them during the summers. Pumps which is all the tech you really need can be easily powered by small solar panels in sunny areas and other places the equivalent of a car battery.
Those that don't want to be bothered can either lease their roofs or setup solar panels.
Indeed!... If you put on white shingles vs. the standard darker ones, your roof can last 5-10 years longer due to remaining cooler in the sun, and not disintegrating as quickly!
Found this out about 4-5 years back when needed a new roof -- guess what color I chose!
Same goes for cars too BTW -- white takes less gas & energy to run/cool and the paint will last longer --
Yeah I'd never seen 'shingles' on roofs before I visited the US. Here in Australia clay/terracotta tiling is the standard roofing material on virtually all houses. Some use corrugated steel. But 'shingles' as a concept was foreign to me. In fact, to this day I still don't really think of them as a 'proper' roofing material. I mean they are so thin and flimsy...just doesn't seem like they are suited for a permanent structure (then again, many houses in the US seem to be built from all kinds of 'light' materials like wood and vinyl (siding), which is radically different to here where most houses are solid brick, concrete and steel). That's just a bias I have due to not being exposed to those kind of buildings till I was in my 20s though - I know that they serve their purpose effectively and are suitable for the climates they are in ... it's just this niggling bias in the back of my mind that such materials aren't appropriate for a 'serious' building.
Around here people have all different colours for their roof tiles. Natural reddish clay colour is popular but I've seen everything from black to white.
HOAs make one "neighbor from hell" into many "neighbors from hell".
Uniformity in housing is an appeal to create an aesthetic of order where it really doesn't exist. Life isn't tidy no matter how your dress it up.
Depends on the association. Drive around Redmond, Kirkland, Old Issaquah in Washington State, Queen Anne Hill, West Seattle, and a bunch of other areas and you'll discover some seriously stunning zones for landscaping and individual exterior looks. Those locations allowed for all Homes to be built uniquely, but require the damn landscaping to be done and maintained. Tiger Mountain in Issaquah is where an old friend's folks live and the entire zone is part of an HOA and the homes are stunning, the landscaping varies from one owner with 10 acres and Thoroughbreds to their plot of 2.9 acres with traditional Bavarian presentation. Don't confuse the 70s Suburbia and Dead End Culdesacs with truly planned and environment conscious deployments from homes starting at $120k all the way up into the millions. It depends on your location and the intelligence of the region's population.
That is a good point that I think most European's don't realize: In Europe, the weather is much more constant than the US. We have hail, tornadoes, wild swings in temperature from winter to summer. The Pilgrims had balls moving here, the weather would suck in the US if not for a good roof and central heat and air.
In much of Europe, there is no need for air conditioning. All you have to do is look at Minnesota today, heat index of 117, to realize they wouldn't like it here without A/C.
The weather is constant, all right. A couple hours north of the Med, it's cold, cloudy, and pissing rain 2/3'rds of the year. You may not need air conditioners, but you do need heaters. They use energy too.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I can't believe how those Homeowners associations have proliferated so greatly, and why so many people out up with this.
Once you buy the land...shouldn't it be YOURs to do with as you please? I'm surprised someone with enough spare $$ and time hasn't had many of those agreements thrown the fuck out.
The number of homeowners associations is directly correlated with the number of shithead neighbors who are unable to maintain their home, but ARE able to collect every broken-down wreck-of-a-car and have it towed onto their front lawns. And when I say lawn, I mean gravel sprinkled with dog crap.
Better me getting my tax back than some bludger.
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
I wouldn't bet on it, if his case is like mine. I have a 4-year-old house with a 50-year roof (galvanized zinc). Maybe I will, maybe I won't. It almost certainly won't be any time soon.
People don't have to buy disposable roofs.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Yeah, but it may well be later rather than sooner. There's glazed clay-tiles on my house which is built in 1980, which is 30 years ago, and they're holding up fine, I'd not be surprised if the roofing is okay for another few decades.
It's very odd. There's no HOAs here in Norway, atleast if they exist, they must be uncommon seeing as I've never come into contact with one.
But even in the absence of one, it's not as if one can do ANYTHING. You're still restricted both by law, and by municipal regulation.
Yeah, those are wide freedoms. But why not ? Ain't USA supposed to be land of the free ? Yes this means I can paint my house purple if I damn well please, but guess what, it's -MY- house. Your property-value sank (a tiny fraction of what mine did) ? Tough luck !
Most parts of America could benefit from this advice, which is what green building design advocates are saying. Clinton's just onto one of the most simple and direct talking points. It'd be one step towards passive solar design, which we'd all best apply, because doing otherwise is simply flagrant waste of energy spent fighting more energy that ought to be redirected instead.
It depends. Signaling poverty will drive down prices. So if houses are poorly maintained and have yards full of junk, for example, prices will be lower.
But a well-maintained but "peculiar" house ? No, that'd not make me skeptical in the least. If anything, I'd probably consider it a likely home of creative types of people, but people who care about maintaining their property well, and I don't see what should be problematic about that.
But most HOAs are opposite: you'll probably get away with waiting 5 years too long with repainting the thing, but you'll probably -not- get away with painting the house purple.
And yeah, I've purchased a house. Twice in the last 5 years, even.
Just before Christmas was had a massive hail storm (some as big as cricket balls)
I've tried to determine how big cricket balls are, but the little critters just wouldn't sit still long enough.
You have a problem that you cannot believe others have a different preference than yours... The only illusion here is yours -- thinking that you know better than everyone else what they actually want.
Huh? I said precisely nothing about preferences, nor other peoples preferences. In fact I don't have any, not being in America and never having encountered a HOA. That stuff's all in your own head.
My point was that the idea that people can make free choices in all areas of their life is naive. The idea that the market solves all is ignorant. If you don't know that, then you need to look at game theory. Everyone making the most advantageous choices in their own interests at all times, can still result in no-one getting what they want.
Anyone who got to the table at the title office and THEN made an issue out of the HOA is a moron. The homeowner can't just opt his property out to sell it. If you were bargaining for a house in a HOA area you should know that and not be an ass and go to the table when you know you aren't going to make the deal.
I painted my 3000 square foot roof white for 15 years (every 2-3 years) and I measured the ceiling with an infrared thermometer. The roof was my ceiling, about six inches thick. The temp dropped about 15f and was absolutely worth the trouble. Two problems: 1: Asphalt shingles soak up paint fast. 2: It has to be repainted in 3-4 years. tl:dr white roofs work.
White take less gas? Oh, you live in the south. You realize not everyone does, right?
Here in the north I don't run the AC except for a week or two in the summer, but I run the heater 5 months a year, and having a darker car is far more comfortable for most of the year. People often idle their cars for a while before going anywhere in the winter to heat them up and defrost the windows, etc.
Darker cars make more sense here, but I'm not about to say everyone everywhere should have them because I realize not everyone lives where I do.
Coming off patent won't really help things much. Most thermocromatic substances are UV sensitive and deteriorate fairly quickly in direct sunlight. Not really a good roofing material.
The above pretty sums up the problem in the west. The guy is honest at least but we have become very lazy. Some crazies on slashdot wonder when the revolution will come... well never. Because a revolution requires you to get up out of your lazy chair and do something and westerners just don't do it anymore. And this isn't going to be a post pro-claiming race-x will take over because there are a number of equally or even lazier cultures out there.
Painting buildings white to reflect heat is hardly a new idea. In some areas heat was not a major issue so we used black roofing material and just put up with the occasional heat. Now that AC has become mainstream, it is an issue because we no longer put up with some heat during the summer but still forget to build our buildings to keep out the heat. It isn't rocket science it isn't even about being eco friendly it is about saving money that comes out of your own pocket.
And the above guy can't be arsed. Wanna bet he complains about every penny he has to spend on his utility bill? But won't take any action?
That is why there won't be a revolution. It requires a direct link between "I got a complaint" and "I am DOING (not going to do) something about it".
And people wonder why politicians don't listen... do you spend much time taking advice from sheep?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Better me getting my tax back than some bludger.
Well, to be accurate, you got a fraction of a cricket's balls worth of your taxes back.
The bludgers (or the crickets) got the rest.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Your car radiator is painted? Mine is plain metal. In every car and truck I've ever had, or seen being worked on. And that's a lot over a whole lot of years.
If your cars is painted,it was for style, not for radiating heat better.
um so your a complete dumbass?
His a complete dumbass?
high albedo
Isn't that what got Clinton in all the trouble?
He didn't get in that much trouble, though it did reflect poorly on him.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
But running the heater takes no extra gas -- you use the excess heat
of the motor, running the AC requires a substantial energy to run a compressor.
I have a feeling (having lived in Illinois, and Alaska -- so I do know a little bit about 'cold'), that the car color there would only make a difference in being 'seen' against a background of 'white', as the sun is very weak in the winter, and would have substantially less contribution to the cars temperature than it would in the summer -- AND -- in most place, it's cloudier in winter (at least in those places where they get snow with any frequency).
I live in the west, not the south.
More importantly, the time that you might turn on your car before leaving is, in MOST places (a smaller amount of time than you will spend on the road or (especially in urban areas), stuck in traffic.
It might not have as MUCH of a benefit in colder areas, but if you really want to have your cake and eat it too -- throw a black car cover over your car in the winter. Would absorb much more heat than shiny metallic surface painted black.
But then you might just be interested in disagreeing with my point, in which case there is no solution I can offer you other than to say 'we disagree'. ;-)
Over here, where it doesn't snow much, once suitable waterproofed, the roofs are painted with metallic silver colored paint. Lasts for at least 5 years per coating and reflects radiation from infrared to ultraviolet, far outperforming white.
I think it costs more to cool down than to heat up,
That depends. It depends on how you cool or heat, and how much you need to. Personally I'm not a fan of A/C. I prefer just to open a few windows; usually a breeze is enough to cool the room a bit where I live. But if you live in a climate where it's often over 30 degrees, that might not work so well.
In any case, without proper insulation, the effect of living directly under a black roof is very noticeable in summer, and much less so in winter, where regular heat insulation is really what you need. Proper insulation also makes a huge difference in summer, so you're going to need that anyway. I'm pretty sure most houses in the world aren't anywhere near as well-insulated as they should be.
I think roof insulation is a much bigger factor on whether the snow melts than the color of the roof. Also, I think snow insulates, so it might not even be a good idea to remove it. But I'm not sure where that balance lies exactly. Most likely, more research is needed.
"Attic" connotes unconditioned space, i.e., outside the insulation.
You mean you've got all your insulation in the floor below the attic and in the door/stairway/hatch leading to the attic, rather than in the roof above it? That seems very impractical. Not heating your attic makes sense, but not insulating it doesn't.
Which is why I will never buy a house in an HOA. Never. I'd rather chop off my ding-dong than do that.
*steps outside in Los Angeles*
I have no idea what you're talking about. Hail? Tornadoes? Seasons? Don't those only happen in fairy tales?
Surely there must be some middle ground, where the HOA will allow you to paint your house any color you like but prevents you from creating a 20 foot pile of trash in the front yard?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Good luck with that.
While it does sound like a great idea it would never happen. No HOA would ever make an exemption. It defeats the whole purpose of the HOA.
Also, you are going to lose your good faith deposit on the property because you didn't close.
Is it really worth throwing away money to try and screw with the HOA? Just find another property that doesn't have an HOA.
The HOA isn't selling the house, they don't benefit by giving you a seat or an exempt.
The seller won't have the power to give you either.
I don't really see how this is supposed to work unless the HOA really wants to get rid of the seller.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It doesn't freakin' matter!
If they're black, all it proves is that he's a hypocrit, who has so much money that saving 20% on his cooling bill in summer doesn't mean anything to him. That would hardly make him unique amongst politicians. Indeed, it would make him *typical* amongst politicians.
But, still, it doesn't matter. Why?
Because it doesn't change the laws of physics that make painting your roof white a good idea in the first place.
"Bill Clinton claims white cities are better than black cities."
The job crisis is the result of globalization. All the US manufacturing and servicing jobs have been moved overseas, because politicians pushed for globalization of free trade, because their corporate masters told them so.
The result is that the rich get even richer, and the middle class is pushed to being poor and jobless.
During America's heydey, everything was manufactured inside America, and the top tax was 92%. Now, everything is manufactured in Asia and the top tax is 35%. Way to go politicians, way to go.
Years ago I visited a friend while she was at university here in the UK. One of her housemates did indeed sleep in the attic, which had been converted into a bedroom. A friend of mine in Cornwall also slept in the attic, though that was out of choice - it was a bigger room than his old bedroom on the floor below. So, rare yes, but it does happen.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Pay a visit to a certain Mrs Bieber in Canada and beg her to have an abortion ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And those ridge vents are venting hotter air outside whereas white shingles stop the air heating at all (the atmosphere is mostly transparent to visible wavelengths), therefore your home may be cooler, but it isn't cooling the planet.
You should be a coke head or remember Monica's dress with a white spot to not be sure that Bill Clinton got Al Gore's position, just to create a balance of being a nut working for this crazy political dementia over america. But we all should be fine and worry about white roofs, to let politicians take care of 30 million of strarving children of the country. Or let me do his job, I can do this very well because I don't need to be elected for not acting like a jackass.
If so much of the light doesn't get absorbed, then there's nothing to be kept in and your insulating snow isn't a help.
You also need to take off your thick coat when you get inside else your body won' t be warmed by the warm room you entered. Snow would have to be shoveled off.
And you insulate your loft, don't you? So the energy that your loft gains from your rooms is already small. What it loses again is even smaller.
I chose to live in neighborhood with an HOA so I don't have to look at some jackass's 1973 El Camino up on blocks in the front yard. Small sacrifice in my book. YMMV.
Yep, tiles on my roof have been there since the house was built in ~1890
We've replace a couple where the nails went, but thats about it. Worst case is you may want to relay with galvanised nails, but the actual roofing material is usually good for centuries
We were told to do so to stop an atomic blast ....
I give up ...
regards
Paul
You've described mine perfectly. $30 a month....pool I've never used....got a warning for weeds once (and deservedly so). Other than that, they provide a bulletin that lets you advertise your services (lots of independent contractors in mine, and I formed a band and a Mac users group of sorts). We can also warn people who drive too fast because, well, the HOA knows who everybody is.
I've heard of the horror stories of liens and stuff put against your house for having a brown patch of grass, but most people's anti HOA stories have been along the lines of: "they wouldn't let me park my 2 monster trucks and my RV in the front yard" and "the wrote me up for bleedin' a deer in my front yard!". Or to be less dramatic, you really shouldn't have more vehicles than you do driveway/garage space, so therefore you really shouldn't park three or four vehicles on the street. I lived in an HOA with no street parking and it was great for the neighborhood. My current HOA recommends but doesn't enforce that rule, and it looks like Beirut in this neighborhood. Potential buyer of my house need just go one subdivision over and see the difference, and not buy my house because of it.
It's a lot cheaper to heat and keep a house warm than it is to cool and keep it cool. I live in Texas and my electric bill is never lower than $300 a month from May-October.
Has anyone found a way to keep birds away from their car? You need a license to buy a shotgun here and everything else I have tried has failed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't want to jump to conclusions... But is that a troll? I'm from the South, and I see many houses with white shingles. I even nailed down quite a few of those things. It's the color of the gritty stuff, rock or whatever it is. So, no need to paint those. Just buy the right ones when the current shingles need replacing. (As a nostalgic person who suffered through many roofing jobs, I like the new plastic fake-tin roofs that come in many colors, including nice light ones.)
In much of Europe. But I take it you've never been to Vienna in the summer. It's an oven. Same with much of Spain and Italy. Yeah, it's not AS hot as the US. But the folks in Vienna I know for sure could use AC. But they don't. Heck I've even seen guys promenading in the middle of July in sweaters. Because it's cool apparently.
Depends - you live somewhere with energy-efficient buildings where snow doesn't melt away, or the US?
Buy some stock in Google maybe?
Yep, I totally agree. The neighbor from hell who wants to paint his house pink. Then hire a lawyer to fight the HOA when he does not have any defense at all. Yep got to love that guy. Wastes our meager funds. Yep, folks who bitch about HOAs have never dropped 250 grand on a house and watched your neighborhood slowly turn into crack land. If you want freedom get out in the country a bit. Or find a neighborhood that does not have an HOA. You can tell which ones don't cause they usually look like crap and the houses are generally cheaper. Oh don't forget the meth labs proliferating all over the place, like out in the countryside.
You can however keep the pretense of control and preserve the illusion long enough to enjoy your stay here.
Trap heat = massive condensation! Try it. You ever seen water droplets the size of quarters hanging on the wall? How about in your ceiling? Roofs need vented all year around.
I'm setting the BS flag about car color. The color of the car has no impact on the amount of gas & energy that it takes to run and cool it. Radiator fans are only needed at low speeds because air is not moving as fast through them. Then the air conditioner compressor that is running off the engine belt only has 2 settings, on and off. In the summer people just turn them 'on' and adjust the temperature with the blower fan.
The idea that the paint will last longer has some merit, but then again, that is what car wax is made for.
For example: Keeping the authoritarian busybody jackholes that love them from moving into my neighborhood.
You know back on the farm, imagine the deep country of the south, we had folks who lived in trailers. When the roof got old they did not replace it. The construction of the trailer was so cheap that you really could not do anything about the rusted roof. So, they painted it with this white sticky stuff that covered the rusted metal and slowed down the rust. Then they built a wood frame over the whole trailer and roofed it with shingles or tin. This extra roof sat slightly above the original trailer roof. We all thought what a cheap ass ugly solution. You know what, they basically shaded their trailer all summer and the heating bill went down. Not sure what happened to the heating costs in the winter.
Any one else see anything like that? Maybe we could build double roofs with an air gap to moderate the temp in the summer and a way to close the gap in the Winter. Then put solar panels and your good to go.
Yeah, the "neighbor from hell" is mostly of people's own making. I.e., in their own minds.
Granted, if someone's making a ruckus, you can call the police.
Other that that? Mind your own business.
Don't like the color of their paint? The problem is in your head.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
It's a plot by the energy companies. They artificially keep the costs of appliances down to get us hooked on their convenience. We should have to put a wheel barrow full of money right next to the appliance to demonstrate the amount of energy the device will use. Make em use ones in the wheel barrow so we got something to use at the titty bar later.
Buy white shingles sure; but painting your roof? Bad Idea. No Latex paint on an asphalt shingle will survive even a year, including exterior formulated paint. An epoxy paint would be the closest paint formulation that would survive but even that is a bit iffy. If you have steel or ceramic tiles you could try an epoxy paint with a secondary sealant applied but as a painter my suggestion is: don't paint your roof, special order light colored shingles and tiles. I've seen some daft hippies try that nonsense as far back as the 70s, you'd be better off with a living roof with plants. Even epoxy paint tends to bubble off and come off in sheets and chunks (asphalt) or just chip off (tile). Most formulations don't take well to impact (hail and rain) unless the surface is like concrete. Most roof tiles lack a surface that the mixture can really bite into and bond (even with concrete you tend to have to use a surface treatment for good bonding.) and I'd hate to try and apply a surface treatment to an already installed roof.
The number one reason for CO2 levels isn't your light-bulb, air-conditioner, or car. It's people. You can simply take the global population and run it as a regressor against the hippie worshiped hock stick graph. Guess what, your carbon footprint is smaller per person then it was in 1940. 5 minutes and using a tool like R or S-PLUS will tell you the most effective solution is less people, not light bulbs. People aren't burning lamp oil endlessly, London isn't covered in soot and ash anymore, and people don't burn fireplaces 24/7. We don't have J.J. Hill burning an entire train car of coal to heat his house anymore. It's hippie jibberish.
Cut global warming? Passing out free condoms will cut your emissions more then any hippie crap ever will. If you cut your emissions by 90% right now, this very second. Wave a big fucking magical wand, poof, 90% reduction in carbon emissions. All that you saved, all of it, is gone in less then 120 years and you will be right back where you were with current population growth. Light bulbs and white roofs aren't a band-aid even, its bullshit.
All the grant money alone given by the USA alone for green energy would have paid for 1 condom for every man, woman, and child every day of the year for over 100 years. Not to mention it would have likely cut down on STDs.
White roofs now Bill? Really? Hippies love bitching about you needing to switch a light bulb but they can't face the simple truth because it's not a cool pick up line to say, "Yeah man we have change the system man. People have to stop having kids or the world is gonna burn" at a rally.
There are a couple of good ways to prevent ice dams. The first it to properly insulate your attic, and the other is to go and buy a roof rake and get rid of the snow on your roof. Granted if you live in a snowy climate you should probably do both as better insulation will help keep your house warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, and if you have a winter like the one we had last year here in Minnesota it is a good idea to clear the snow off your roof so it doesn't cave in.
Black shingles may actually make ice dams worse as they will melt snow farther up the roof only to have it refreeze once it gets down to the eaves and overhangs, thus actually causing ice dams. This is the basic process which forms ice dams warmer air melts the snow (usually from poor insulation) and it trickles down the roof until it gets above the eaves where it is cooler (no heat from the house here) and refreezes. There were several houses in my neighbor hood that had issues last winter, either from ice dams, or cave ins.
Time to offend someone
I think the HOA mentality is nicely summed up in the selection of points you chose to bring up:
1) pink paint
2) crack
The idea that these two are somehow on the same plane of annoyance is weird. I don't know if you were taking pink paint to be a axiomatic cultural abhorrence and using to to lend credence to #2, or taking crack to be a universal abhorrence and using to support the HOA war on non-beige paint.
Secondly, drugs are illegal anyway. HOAs bind home-owners, not people standing around and possibly selling drugs. Oh, you say loitering is illegal in your city? Well, it's illegal anyway, nothing to do with HOAs.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I'm confused, how does the other house not facing the street affect your house's value? I can think of a couple reasons why it would affect the value of that house (look out the front window and have a nice scenic view of... the side of your house), but nothing that should matter to someone looking to buy your house.
That's often a justification for covenants in neighborhoods, zoning laws, HOA rules, etc...
The orientation of the other house usually will not matter, and for that matter will not be prescribed by zoning laws, etc..., I believe. But things like lot coverage (Are they build right up to all four property lines?) accessory uses (Are they keeping a dozen cows in their front yard for a small farm?) runoff (Are they eroding your yard with all the water from theirs) and signage (Ah, neon profanity. Just what I always wanted in a neighbor) can hurt your property values.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Yeah, make home owners associations illegal.
You mean to say that you don't think other human beings are smart enough to enter into contracts of their own choice when you think those agreements are not a good idea. How you got so smart that you can figure out what they can't is left unclear.
I could see some mandatory disclosures to help people make informed decisions, including having a neutral third-party explain exactly what they are getting into. I know I would never buy into a HOA property. I just can't stand the idea that because I don't like it then others shouldn't be able to chose differently -- it assumes far too much.
This argument has been used to justify almost every contract and practice that exploits people. Sweatshops, no minimum wage law, no child labor laws, no overtime laws, no OSHA laws, no requirement that homes have to be habitable, etc... Not to mention abhorrent practices like payday loans, etc...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
When I was a teenager working for my best friend's dad, we painted asphalt shingles white with a paint brush. I'm sure you could do it with a thick-nap roller, a spray gun, or just by dumping out the can. It's not as hard as you imagine; just be careful your feet don't rub all the gravel off older shingles that have seen too much sun.
Of course, that was in the 1970s, long before Reagan, when conservation was still a conservative value.
"HIstoric" does tend to indicate that there might be some sort of preservation going on. The great thing about this country is that you don't have to live in a historic district if you don't want to. I sure wouldn't. I won't live in any place that has an HOA - I'd rent first.
But I just need to know, why do you consider white roofs nonsense? Every place I've lived in with a flat roof has been painted white. By me. Where I'm at now has light colored shingles, installed by me. Judging by your "Billy Boy" and Crazy Al Gore comments, let me put it in proper context. I like my money. My flat roof house needed painted as part of regular maintenance My house needed new shingles. I put on ones that would save me money. I paid less money on air conditioning, in some rooms not needing it at all. Then I can find better uses for that money than giving it to the utility company or buying new air conditioners. Which I did. Invested it in a TDA.
Point is, white roofs are a very good idea. Dismissing it because of your political inclinations is not necessarily all that smart, and makes you very prone to manipulation.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If all the homes for sale are HOA and the people actually want non-HOA houses, the first developer to offer a non-HOA house will make huge bucks. Developers aren't going to leave money on the table like that. You have a problem that you cannot believe others have a different preference than yours -- that people like HOAs (the majority of them, not the vocal minority) and will actually pay more for a house governed by an HOA.
The only illusion here is yours -- thinking that you know better than everyone else what they actually want. I hope that no one takes that attitude with you and what you want (although it would be sort of ironically just).
You're leaving out an interested third party. The local government. The HOA is the vehicle for the local government to enact regulations they could not muster the political will for, or are otherwise prohibited from enacting. So they use the development & planning commission to collude with the developers and enact regulations with zero-democratic input. That's how you get "no flag pole", and "vegetables are unsuitable" regulations past the court system. For the homebuyer, it's an agreed to private contract, all dressed up as a feature (which you've bought into apparently). But the fact is, the city/county wouldn't allow the developer to build without them.
In a cool zone, it might cool the house a little more, but that's where insulation comes in. THe white roof may reflect heat, but the insulation traps the heat already inside. In cold areas, the snow is white, but acts as another layer of insulation. Look at the eskimo population. They lived well in houses made from white ice for thosands of years
Well this is a great idea. Now who is going to fight all the Homeowner's Associations and their bands of Gestapo Idiots and their lawyers? They need to pass a law, like they did for satellite dishes (HOA's hated that!) to make it OK to do any scientifically approved energy savings stuff. Otherwise, these Gestapo idiots will come down on you like the vermin they are. If congress sets up a nice 'defense fund' for all the millions of homeowners to combat these idiots, my roof would be white next week! Of course the similar argument applies to water conservation. These Gestapo idiots demand you have a nice green grassy lawn; that consumes mega-gallons of fresh water, not to mention all the pesticide/chemical runoff back into our water table, streams and lakes. Anyone have a solution? I'd love to hear it!
Skip Stein Free Agent Management Systems Consulting, Inc. http://www.msc-inc.net www.linkedin.com/in/skipstein
Man, you're so clever. Why don't you post some links to xkcd as well and repeat some memes from 2001.
He whipped out his cell, and I did the same. He asked who I was calling. I told him I was calling the local TV station to send someone out to video volunteers being arrested for participating in a March of Dimes charity event. That he was going to be on the news that evening, We were going to document this correctly. After some thought, he backed down. I was told that was the only thing he ever backed down from.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Ain't USA supposed to be land of the free
That's really more of a Cold War advertising slogan than anything resembling reality. The U.S. is actually one of the least free of the European countries.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I *am* a robot, you insensitive clod!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'd have to measure it, but at least ten degrees and likely more.
Put it this way, it's dramatic. I had to wear sunglasses while applying the coating because the reflected glare is painfully bright on a sunny day. WEAR SUNSCREEN when you put this stuff on, because you'll get baked from above and below.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
How does this work with the other environmental exhortation to put solar panels on your roof?
Note: I'm a fan of solar.
But the two (white roofs and solar panels) seem to be mutually contradictory.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Of her 5-year-old?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Lesson one: end users should be financially responsible for carbon generating activities.
To pick a nit, nothing an end user does "generates" "carbon".
From my point of view, as a consumer, when I turn on a light switch, I am personally electing to load the generating grid which directly affects how much coal my local generating station decides to burn that day (or in the future when they take this day's load calculation into consideration...) If nobody used electricity, the plants wouldn't exist. If you're talking about the nuclear fusion reaction that makes carbon in the first place, then, yeah, we don't have much to do about that. In terms of the current debate, I'm talking about releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a rate higher than the average of the last few millennia. So, if I have absolutely no personal consequences for switching on a 60 amp load to cool the larger space, then switching on a 15 amp load to keep my office from getting too cold - I'm saying that something in that model is broken, it's the ultimate freedom - do what you like to satisfy the smallest of personal desires, but it has consequences.
highly powerful A/C units are way too cheap and easy to install - you can buy a unit for less than 45 days' energy cost. People need to be educated on the true cost of ownership of these things (and portable electric heaters, too.)
That's called freedom and you're complaining about it.
It's that kind of thinking that leads to climate change skepticism, proponents are far too quick to complain that other people have too much freedom to live however they want.
LK
If we still had the freedom to use R-12 refrigerant, I'd be complaining about that too - even though at one point in my life it was 10% the cost of any viable alternatives. In Florida they legislated away the freedom to use Arsenic as a wood preservative, I did complain about that for a few years when it happened, but five years on, I'm actually glad that particular freedom is gone. If you want models of what happens when everybody lives as they want, look at wildlife population studies - when a predator-prey pair go out of balance, it goes really good for awhile, for both sides if there's a shortage of predators - but let it run too long, and there's a miserable bust for both sides at the end of the boom.
Humans are clearly out of balance with the chemical energy resources of the planet, people born today will see the end of the cycle, I'm just hoping for a soft landing, for their sake. And, returning to the topic, painting a roof white is an insanely high ROI activity that works in a positive direction - if the owners and residents of a building with a black roof are just too lazy or preoccupied to make it happen, something is seriously messed up in that place.
You crazy americans and your cardboard houses!
In Australia the standard is either clay/concrete tiles, or colourbond steel (painted corugated zincalume) - both of which last 20+ years with minimal maintenance.
We have got an awful lot of people who make a living building these disposable houses, if we suddenly had shelter as reliable and maintenance free as caves, they'd all be out of work.
Counter with big trees and a big fence. You'll survive, Your house value should not be the market value any way. That is not what it is for. It's a house to your neighbors and potential buyers....To YOU it should be a HOME!
Most people are mostly good most of the time.
I have actually had this same idea...only I believe I thought it through a little more. Painting your roof white is great...in the summer. Maybe they should do this in the south only. Because when it is cold in the winter, you need the roof's heat to help lower your costs of your heating bill. So for people in the north who experience cold winters, how does a white roof help?
Just before Christmas was had a massive hail storm (some as big as cricket balls)
I've tried to determine how big cricket balls are, but the little critters just wouldn't sit still long enough.
You're not doing it right, my crickets keep coming back, they can't get enough of it.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
I was thinking about how roads could benefit from this as well? Roads, and especially parking lots.
If you paint the asphalt a lighter color, you've just wiped out a major heat-sink, especially in an urban environment. You wouldn't want to do this in an area that has any appreciable amount of snow, but in Southern states it would be a very big help.
That's when I realized a potential savings in another aspect? Street lighting. If the roads and parking lots are painted white, or even a lighter color, you could cut back on the amount of street lighting. Heck, in some areas, you could get away with ambient light from the city itself.
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I wonder if the benefits reverse is really cold climates with long winters. Seems like what you save in cooling could be cancelled in additional heating costs depending on where you are. I wonder where that balancing point is.
That's how you get "no flag pole", and "vegetables are unsuitable" regulations past the court system.
Actually the no-vegetables was the city, not the HOA.
For the homebuyer, it's an agreed to private contract, all dressed up as a feature (which you've bought into apparently).
It's not a feature for me. I have a few old car projects in my driveway and random shit all over the place. My grass is up to my knees. I would never buy into an HOA.
It's a feature for other people, however.
But the fact is, the city/county wouldn't allow the developer to build without them.
If that's what the voters in that city/county want, that's their business. Who am I to tell them they must accept development under whatever terms the developer demands?
Well I'm not too bothered about developer demands either. But if the previous poster is right that this is a way for local government to make rules they wouldn't make through law, then that a bad thing. It's not transparent democracy.
So during our long, freezing winters, we'll still be saving energy by having a cooler roof?
It depends on where you live and the time of the year.
If it is 80+out -- I agree.
But if it is 60-70, a white car -- you just open the windows or turn on
the vent, but w/black pain -- you are going to want the AC much more often.
Of course if you are one of those type who can be bothered by open air, well...an open window might be too radical, but for people who don't mind
windows @ slower speeds or vent @ higher....which put's off the time needed before turning on the AC.
It certainly doesn't eliminate the need by any stretch of the imagination,
but in fair weather...it's nice to have fresh air from the outside (depending
on where you live --- there can always be exceptions...)
Surely there must be some middle ground, where the HOA will allow you to paint your house any color you like but prevents you from creating a 20 foot pile of trash in the front yard?
I think the HOA is the most blatant example of the "slippery slope" theory.
I live on the 12th floor of a building in Harlem, which is mostly 6- and 8-story apartment buildings. Many of the buildings in my neighborhood participate in the "Cool Roofs" program run by the city, which gives owners a tax break (or rebate or something) for painting their roof white.
Except they don't use white paint. All of the roofs I can see are painted in a metallic-style silver color. It's really quite striking.
Anyway, the NYC program is here, and is pretty successful if my neighborhood is any indication: http://www.nyc.gov/html/coolroofs/html/home/home.shtml
Please understand what you are responding to. The OP thought that considering the loan interest rate of the money meant that the money would actually have to be loaned. The OP then went on to say "start living on your own fucking money", referring to the OOP not having 10$ of spare cash since the OP thought the OOP said that he would have to loan the 10$. If you yourself understand what opportunity cost is, then you'll also know that the OP needs to Google it. That the actual opportunity cost on 10$ is tiny has nothing to do with the topic, so I don't know what your point is. You could have made that reply to OOP. The OP was also wrong in thinking that the total cost was 10$ in the first place.
(Darn, nobody even modded my attempted pun funny.)
Being only the second president ever to be impeached isn't "that much trouble"? (Of course, he wasn't convicted.)
Anti-HOA stories are about like anti-lawsuit stories. Everyone has some example that's clearly way out of bounds, and will use it all the time, and it's probably imaginary to start with, or a mangled story of one thing that happened one time in all of human history.
Meanwhile, the actual HOA rules tend to be usually somewhat sane.
And to most people who complain: I'm sorry, your house should be somewhat presentable. As long as homeowners a) are allowed to actually change their house, and the HOA isn't insanely dictating the exact way every house should look, and b) if homeowners get warnings instead of just slapped with fines, the HOA is fine.
The problem is the rare times no one pays attention to the HOA and lets it get hijacked by a tiny amount of people who can make crazy rules. And even then, they can only make the rules until they piss off enough people to override them. Which is fine...unless they decide to pick on you, and no one else. As long as their unreasonableness is tightly focused, no one else is going to step in to help stop them.
This is why, as I said, sane HOAs have quorum requirements that require 50%, or at least 20% or something, to make new rules. So that a tiny group of people can't decide to do whatever they want. If people are so apathetic about the HOA so much the HOA can't get the quorum require to do something, well, it sounds like no one really wants the HOA doing something anyway, so the inability to do anything is a feature, not a bug.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
you'd be wrong, i personally have been involved in the same sort of project (dark roof to light) in much more northerly latitudes, and even there, the benifit was, as you say, 'Obvious, and immediately noticeable'
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Lots of debate here about emissivity and reflectivity. Can someone explain this better?
* Wikipedia on Reflectivity shows Aluminum has great reflectivity across the spectrum. But we all know that aluminum is shiny and reflective.
* This list of emissivity shows Aluminum is really really low, way lower than White paint. http://www.infrared-thermography.com/material.htm
Wouldn't we want a few cheap rolls of aluminum foil to reflect the heat, instead? The emissivity discussion above seems to state otherwise....
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I think it is wonderful that everyone has an idea of how to be more energy efficient. However, according to most analysts -- doing this in a northern area will not save that much energy because of the loss of heat in the winter. It definitely would work in the south -- heck, the south should use cisterns and white roofs like in Bermuda, so they can use the water from rain runoff also...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiant_barrier
Go correct this wiki page if your so sure your correct.
if transmissivity =0 then the reflectivity + emissivity =1
So they are really the same term but subtracted from one from each other.
So, if I have absolutely no personal consequences for switching on a 60 amp load to cool the larger space, then switching on a 15 amp load to keep my office from getting too cold - I'm saying that something in that model is broken, it's the ultimate freedom - do what you like to satisfy the smallest of personal desires, but it has consequences.
Of course you do, a higher electric bill.
If we still had the freedom to use R-12 refrigerant, I'd be complaining about that too - even though at one point in my life it was 10% the cost of any viable alternatives. In Florida they legislated away the freedom to use Arsenic as a wood preservative, I did complain about that for a few years when it happened, but five years on, I'm actually glad that particular freedom is gone.
Except, of course, the science behind such bans can be demonstrated and the results reproduced.
R12 destroys Ozone, in the lab or in the world. Arsenic is poisonous, in the lab or in the world..
Carbon dioxide emissions as the source of global warming is still speculation.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Wait, you mean to tell me 36th term abortions aren't legal in Canada ? So much for the liberal panacea... :P
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Bill Clinton is correct in that it would help with global warming. I have had a water cooled air conditioner on my roof where summers are 100f plus and the difference in the temperature of the roof was about 15degrees f. lower. My air conditioning worked much better from then on. We should also be using light colored or white driveway sealers, and highway pavements. All this along with the planting of a lot of white flowers world wide all could significantly reduce the surface temperature of the earth, especially in urban areas. Harvey journeyman painter for over 30 years.
I'm on a HOA board for a small 9-member association. We just modified our dues structure in order to satisfy a buyer's lender. We did it because the seller needed to sell, and if this deal walked they would have to lower their asking price, reducing the value of all of our properties.
In the current real estate market we would do any reasonable concession to grease the wheels on a sale. I am certain that HOAs in most parts of the country are super sensitive to home prices and are willing to deal right now. Make sure you get it in writing, though. Boards come and go, and when the economy is booming they won't remember why they allowed you to plant a farm in your front yard or whatever.
Man, you really need that seminar!
In Israel they are doing it for year now, painting the roofs with quicklime. (I guess in other hot countries they do the same) there is even a mentioning in the "Talmud", that one of the scholars painted his root top with quicklime, that's like 2000 years ago.
The trouble with albedo puns is that people don't reflect enough on them.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
He attempted to paint Monica's dress white. Evidence he believes in the cause!
IIRC, one of the reasons that traditional clay tile roofs have been around so long, particularly in warm climates, is that there is a continuous flow of air between the tiles and the underlayment due to natural convection. The tiles may get quite hot, but the air flow keeps most of that heat from reaching the rest of the building.
This is true, but white tiles would still be far better for the environment. White tiles would reflect most of the heat/light back out into the atmosphere where a fair portion of it would end up making it back into space. Regular tiles help keep the house cool, but still heat up the surrounding air, causing a slight temperature increase for everyone. Of course, one house isn't going to make a difference, but the point was that if everyone did it, then the temperature of the entire area would drop by a few degrees.
(Note that I'm not suggesting reflecting all light for an area into space as we need that light for growing plants and such. But light that gets absorbed by roofs and streets end up being bad for everyone.)
I think you don't know what you're talking about much less being confused. Emissivity defines reflectivity, as in an objects emissivity rate is it's effective reflection rate for a particular wavelength at a particular temperature, etc. etc.
Also, the solar spectrum is not most intense at the visible part. To quote Wikipedia, who has a source.
"Sunlight at zenith provides an irradiance of just over 1 kilowatt per square meter at sea level. Of this energy, 527 watts is infrared radiation, 445 watts is visible light, and 32 watts is ultraviolet radiation.[2]"
The GP's point still stands for two very important reasons, most objects emit radiation almost exclusively in the infrared and visible light is a significant source of energy. To demonstrate the importance of this, take these two situations:
Situation 1:
You have a paint A which reflects 50% of visible and 50% of infrared light. Paint B reflects 90% of visible light, but only 40% of infrared. This is more or less the situation described by the original parent where the Krylon paint has higher infrared emissivity (lower reflectivity). From the numbers you provided, paint A would be absorbing 486 Watts (527*.50+445*.50) while paint B would be absorbing 320 Watts (527*.10+445*.60). So paint B would still absorb less energy, and it would dissipate the energy more quickly as infrared radiation, while paint B would be forced to conduct more of its energy into the underlying surface.
Situation 2:
Taken to the extreme, paint C reflects 0% of visible light and 100% of infrared light. Paint D reflects 100% of visible light and 0% of infrared. Now paint D is consuming more energy than paint C, however it is simultaneously quickly dissipating most of that energy via infrared. Paint C however will probably burst into flames if its underlying surface is unable to absorb enough of the energy quickly enough.
These are both carefully crafted situations to show specifically that higher emissivity in the infrared CAN be just fine, and it's good to know that this is often not the case. The point was to clearly show the flaw in the OP's assertion that Krylon white paint having a higher emissivity in the infrared could somehow be the only fact to prove that it would be worse for covering a house.
Furthermore, and conveniently ignored, is the fact that above a certain latitude more energy is expended heating in the winter than cooling in the summer. New York City and Chicago are above that latitude, which is around 38-42 degrees on the East Coast depending on the year's average solar irradiance but varies widely across the country (because of airflow and humidity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation
Or the fact that air conditioning was never a major concern for energy conservation, since the vast majority of energy used in buildings are to heat it, not cool it.
http://www.eia.gov/kids/energy.cfm?page=us_energy_homes-basics
In very cold climates/seasons, the roofs are typically covered with snow, which negates the benefits of light absorbing roofs. Often you'll see snow melt just where the roofs are leaking heat, which is where you would would a roof with a very low emissivity in the infrared. And at those latitudes and times of the year, the amount of solar radiation available is not going to make much impact. Besides, heating energy statistics can be very misleading. For instance, the Mall of America in Minnesota runs their cooling system all year round due to the heat produced by lighting and human bodies.
Oh, great, now the roofs have become racist. XD :)