Slashdot Mirror
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."
Pigeons. Lots of Pigeons. Just sprinkle roof with bread crumbs, and get out of the way.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Black also radiates heat the most. Which it will do when it is dark most of the winter.
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.
I've yet to see any savings. First I covered my flat roof with solar panels, then to go super-green I took the extra step of painting them all white. The house not only isn't cooler, but the energy efficiency of those panels is abysmal!
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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."
I heard his old house was completely white.