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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."
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.
...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!
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.
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.
Steven Chu said it earlier:
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/05/27/steven-chu-white-roofs-to-fight-global-warming/
New Economic Perspectives
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.
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?
I'm going to repeat what the AC posted so others can see it. Evidently nobody else reads the other posts (shocking, I know) since this question has been asked about 10 times already, so one dupe on an answer should be OK.
I live in Minnesota. Those same 8 months you're talking about my asphalt singled roof is covered in snow. It doesn't matter what color it is.
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."
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
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
Where I live we get maybe a week of snow total. Cold does not equal snow.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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
Look. Just because somebody thought of something you haven't doesn't make them dumb. People have been talking about this for years, and *yes* they've taken into account the fact that you'd like to get solar heating from your roof in the winter.
You don't get much solar heating in the winter at the latitude of New York because the days are short and the sunlight oblique. New York is at roughly 40 degrees of latitude, and midwinter the sun rises to less than 30 degrees of elevation off the horizon.
The argument might make sense for La Paz, Bolivia, but not New York.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
I live in New England, but my roof is slanted enough that the snow does not stay on it yet I spend far more on heating my house than I do on cooling it. Plus there are plenty of places where much of the year they are heating and yet there is very little snow. Maybe this problem is more complicated than we are making it out to be by applying what we are familiar with in our own houses and climates.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
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.
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.
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.
No white is still better in the winter. Black roofing causes excessive melting of the snow during daylight leading to iced up gutters and ice dams at night which end up causing major water damage.
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
There is the reverse, less heat generated in winter argument as you say. But consider this, if there's less heat being generated, less likely that some of the snow melts and runs off and freezes into your gutters.
:)
Sometimes the bad can be helpful
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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
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*
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
Sure, buy a lot of Kindles and change pages twice a year. A two-page PDF with one black and one blank page will do the trick.
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
...all roofs in New York should also be painted black in winter, because damnit, it gets cold in New York in winter.
During the winter, day is shorter than night, and your house is always heated to ~70F (both day and night). Hence, your roof will radiate energy for longer period (night) than it would absorb the energy (day). And black bodies radiate energy better than white ones. Conclusion is that it is better to have white roof during the winter.
No sig today.
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.
We live on the top floor of a small apartment building that has a flat roof, and with the landlord's permission, I painted it with aluminized roof coating at the end of last summer. I can now definitely state that our interior temperatures are about 10 F cooler than last summer (hey, we're geeks, we measured it). We still go above ambient, but only about 5 F instead of 15 F. It went from intolerable (there is no A/C) to not-so-bad, and the rest of the building shares the benefit, although much less than we do.
I can't speak to how much more energy we're using during the winter because we don't see those figures and didn't think of a way to measure it (like duty cycle of the heater on our floor) in time.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
My roof is already covered in a white powdery substance all winter. It goes away in the spring.
Hm, the cartels are using your roof as storage space? Best be careful of that, the DEA isn't likely to be sympathetic if you plead ignorance.
Bow-ties are cool.
Keynesians most definitely understand the Broken Window Fallacy. That's why they typically advocate that the government should hire people to do useful stuff, preferably stuff that would have to be done sometime but kept on getting put off, rather than useless stuff during a recession. A typical Keynesian would likely suggest investing in bridge and levee projects, because both need a lot of work and a recession is the cheapest time to do such things (because your workers and suppliers are demanding lower prices). And then, if you take that approach, you get better infrastructure which makes your economy stronger post-recession, you have workers with useful skills, and you've stimulated the economy.
The bit about paying people to do useless work is part of Keynes' larger argument that in order to stop a recession you need to put money in the hands of people who are broke, so they can buy stuff, thus creating demand for stuff that stimulates business. He thought it better to do useful work than useless work, he just argued that it was better for people to do useless work than to sit on their butts at home.
I am officially gone from
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
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
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.
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!
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no sig for you. come back one year.
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."
Money spent on burning oil is not as productive as money spent on new and innovative products.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Pollen, dirt, tree sap. Great idea, but after 5 years, how reflective "white" will a white roof be anymore?
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So, money that is spent on heating costs doesn't have any effect on the economy? Where does that money go then?
Yeah - you're right. Let's leave all the windows open whenever we're running the heater or air conditioning - think of all the jobs we'll create in the gas/coal industries! :-P
Here's a thought for you - increasing efficiency let's us spend more time working on other things that improve quality of life - there's a good reason that civilization really started taking off once we figured out how to use fossil fuels to do massive amounts of work for minimal amounts of labor...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
Old house or newer (less the 20 years) house? If it is older see if you can get insulation added. If you are due for a new roof shingles and wood, add insulation then. If they are taking off the wood, it is easy to add insulation at that time. Change the windows to better ones. Again if doing that see about getting more insulation added.
If you are building go with 2 X 6 construction for the exterior walls. The extra 2 inches means more insulation the the outside walls. Could go 2 X 8 for even more insulation in the walls. But then you would have some major window sills. Good or bad depending on your point of view. I know people in the mid Atlantic region. So not as cold as you, but I'll compare their costs to their neighbors. The 2 X 6 house with a lot of insulation burned 100 gallons of heating oil last year. The 2 X 4 house burned 500 gallons. The houses were the same design, in the same development. The differences were the outside wall construction and the house exposure. The 2 X 6 house faced south. while the other one faced east. Both are on the water. Between the construction and the sun heating the one house, their heating bills are a lot less. The cooling bills are less too, just not as much. Electric bills are $200-$250 vs $400-$450 a month for July and August.
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.
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.
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.
Mod parent up!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've got only one question:
What are the colors of the roofs on Clinton's various properties?
Liberty.
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
Isn't that what got Clinton in all the trouble?
But where are you getting 5% these days? 1% is more like it.
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.
And the cells cost me nothing - the government paid the $8k for cells and installation
No, you paid for those too...
Sapere aude!
Which is why I will never buy a house in an HOA. Never. I'd rather chop off my ding-dong than do that.
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.