UPDATE: have a look at Clinton’s house below. Yep, that’s the big plan. Paint your roofs white. From the Atlantic:
I have no problem with saving energy, especially in the summer when power drain is excessive due to A/C load. California now requires most flat-roofed buildings to be white. As a testament to the potential cash savings, Walmart has installed white roofs on 75% of its stores in the United States. Roofs comprise over 20% of urban surface, so while painting them all white in a city, there’s still a lot of asphalt.
But paint roofs white has a downside as well as an upside. It depends on where you live. If you live in a mostly warm climate, say Miami or Phoenix, you’ll realize energy savings. But if you live in Minot,ND or International Falls, MN your white roof will not absorb as much sunlight in winter, thus requiring more energy for heating.
The point is, painting roofs white natiowide, willy nilly, without regard to the local climate, average temperatures, the number of days of sunshine etc. won’t be a full solution.
An idea like Cool Angle, might work, but is far more involved than a paint job.
=============================================
UPDATE: Reader John provides this image link to the former president’s home. Goose, gander, and all that. We look forward to seeing Bill lead the way.
Source: http://www.zillow.com/howto/FamousPresidentsHomes.htm
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“But if you live in Minot,ND or International Falls, MN your white roof will not absorb as much sunlight in winter, thus requiring more energy for heating.”
I live in Vermont and I can assure you that my roof is white all winter. White paint is not going to change that in any way.
HenryP says:
July 19, 2011 at 6:20 am
No, any white paint will do if you’re talking about reflecting incoming solar energy. It’s quite simple – the fact that something looks white is how you know it is reflecting rather than absorbing most of the visible light energy. That’s not to say some white paints aren’t better than others (particularly as regards energy in non-visible wavelengths), but it would be wrong to think only specialised paints will do the trick.
Has anyone thought about where all the white pigment will come from? Most “white” is from titanium dioxide. The minerals that contain titanium such as rutile are not very abundant. For all I know, maybe China or Saudi Arabia have the world’s greatest supply of titanium bearing minerals. Or maybe we should use “white lead” as old fashioned white paint did. Oh, I know, I know, maybe Al Gore and Bill Clinton can start a titanium mining company (very, very heavily subsidized with massive new federal taxes). Yeah, that’s the ticket, that will surely save the world from this horrible climate change which doesn’t seem to be happening at all.
Green roofs with plants are much better.
The Rolling Stones can remake one of their hits. “I see a black roof and I want it painted white. “
Florida did a big study of roofing reflectances which I haven’t read for a while, but I think this is it:
http://www.dca.state.fl.us/fbc/commission/FBC_0210/Green_Roofs/FSEC-CR-1220-00.pdf
What I remember is
1. Aluminum works better than white paint for flat roofs, but is a big improvement over black tar. You can buy flat roofing fabric that is already aluminum color. It’s more expensive, but well worth it. If you Google Earth Queens, you’ll find that maybe 2/3 of the flat roofs already are silver. This idea has been around since at least 1956, when my engineer father ran the numbers and applied a 5 gallon bucket of aluminum paint to the tar roof of an old building he was using as a photometric laboratory in Boulder.
2. Color isn’t everything in shingles. You want good reflectivity of solar radiation as well as good radiation of long-wave IR. Black is bad, and light is good, but brown is a lot worse than blue tones (as I recall). There are colorless (?) coatings that will greatly improve IR radiation and maybe even reflectivity. Perhaps you can buy shingles with the coating already on.
3. White tiles were popular in Florida in the 1920s and very effective, but with AC everyone switched to Mediterranean red tiles. There are flecked files that are almost as good as white but not as harsh visually.
4. The report has lots of stuff on bare vs painted corrugated metal roofs. I forget which is best.
The reflectivity of urban roofs won’t affect global temperatures perceptibly, but could substantially reduce the demand for AC and therefore energy, which is expensive and generates real pollutants in addition to harmless CO2, so it makes sense to give it a try. Especially in warm climates where winter heating is not a big expense.
If it were such a good idea, and actually saved money, people would already be doing it. Nor would they need a guvment taxpayer-funded “program” to do it.
The idea reeks of politics and of Greenie pie-in-the-sky ideology.
Global warming has been created in models and theory that is detached from reality and that is how I will paint my roof white.
“It is called the Hansen adjustment…”
Recently we had a minimum for a Spring day which was extremely low for the mid-coast of NSW. I decided to check the BOM for an official temp. Sure enough, the temp reading was amazingly low for a day so far into the Spring. This was just one very rare occasion when I happened to check and to remember.
By evening, half a degree had been added to the reading.
Shingles…
I just so-happens to be at a point to reshingle my 5000 sq-ft roof.
Turns out that the so-called 35-year shingles lasted only 14 years. According to IKO, the crappy shingles that need replacing were their “Organic” shingles. IKO’s foray into appeasing the Greenies in the 1990’s yielded substandard shingles and more money OUT of my pocket.
I’ll stick to black asphalt….One bitten, twice shy.
By deflecting light and heat, wouldn’t white roofs actually contribute to atmospheric warming? The solar energy has to go somewhere.
I see Bill hasn’t painted his yet..
http://www.zillowstatic.com/static/images/famoushomes/presidents/ClintonChappaqua.jpg
Yes, let’s paint all the roofs white and install acres of black PV panels, yes, that should do it! /sarc
Henry@Paul S
Sorry Paul, but I am really not sure about that.
For example, if I look from the top (flying over) then my zinc galvanised corrugated roof seems to reflect a lot more light then the white walls (of my house). How do you explain that?
If you really like to cool the planet, don’t you think it is a better idea to refrain from removing all the snow in winter? My investigations seem to support the notion that some warming is happening in the NH due to removal of snow in the winter months, e.g.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/the-weather-in-holland
I saw the same thing happening in Norway.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
(removal of snow is not really a green activity, you know)
I’m fine with it as long as the building owners who realize the energy savings are paying the bill. I have a feeling though that Clinton prefers a government program paid for by taxpayers or by borrowing a few trillion more.
I am involved in the roofing industry and ordinary white paint won’t work. There are good white reflective coatings that will do the job, but they are quite expensive.
Lots of great responses here to the “paint all the roofs white” scenario. A liberal comes up with a “great” idea and wants to impose it on the citizens. Except it ain’t so simple, is it? The cost of the technology, the net energy savings by locale, the practicality of the idea, the geopolitical costs for acquiring the materials, the benefits of alternative technology and materials – they’re all in heavy dispute.
Sounds a lot like the AGW gabfest, doesn’t it? Nothing clearcut any more.
It is an affordable solution that would help to sustain employment levels in the construction energy.
The recently released SDO videos by NASA have me concerned however with an hypothesized comparison to the Carrington Event whose surface energy splashback is thought to have energized the last 150 years of sunspot (can see Van der Waals forces continue to push diffuse energy resources to the surface that are not sufficiently congealed so as to overcome Lorentz forces and having the Carrington Event splash back overcome that.) From this viewpoint, the Carrington Event appears to be an indication of the idea that the heliosphere encountered greater magnetic density within the local fluff. It implies that the sun’s surface has exhausted the Carrington energy bonus and still finds itself in magnetically denser portions of the local fluff. Does it respond by reducing sunspots, having its core become more massive with energy products that cannot escape which thus force a tightening of the gravitational current sheet…changes the planetary orbital plane….coriolis conditions especially in higher latitudes…tectonics/magentism…………
The problem with white roofs is that they get dirty very fast, loosing much of their ability to reflect heat. Silver is a better choice as the loss of reflectivity with dirt is less. I had a flat roof on a townhouse I once lived in. Keeping the roof clean was a frequent and major chore and required lots of water – multiply that across all the flat roofs in Arizona and you could have an unsustainable increase in water use. My current house has green concrete tiles on a pitched roof with a radiant barrier underneath, very thick insulation above the cieling, and a well ventilated attic. The combination of these technologies outperforms a flat roof painted white. Painting the roof white – which my homeowner’s association forbids – would probably add nothing to the performance of the roof system. And the desert dust would turn it brown in no time. The energy efficiency of a home depends on so many factors that a “paint the town white” panacea has no hope of having a payoff. If our landscaping rules would allow me to plant the kinds of trees that would really shade my house . . .
Byz says:
July 19, 2011 at 12:05 am
Keynes said that it was better for an economy to pay someone to dig a hole and fill it in again, than to just let them be unemployed.
Regardless of the value of the work, if people work they pay taxes and more importantly get into the habit of working (you should see the youth over here in the UK they don’t want to work).
======================================================================
And Keynes was wrong! Even if they pay taxes, it is still a net negative to the govt. budget. BTW, the painter wouldn’t pay any taxes here in the U.S. except the state and local sales taxes. We’re not going to pay them enough for them to pay fed income taxes. They would be in the lower bracket which would receive additional money from the federal govt. Job programs don’t work unless the benefits of the labor exceed the costs. And if the benefits would exceed the costs, odds are it already would have been done by the private sector.(there are a few exceptions)
As far as getting people into the habit of working, that’s easy. Quit making people comfortable in poverty. To be sure, we should take care of their needs but nothing else. There will always be people who wish to game the system and there will always be people that simply don’t wish to work, however, when not working exceeds the benefits of working then there is a problem. This is what is occurring today, in the U.S. and many other developed western nations. Largely, we’ve Keynes to thank for this.
Specifically to this idea, let us all quit pretending Clinton came up with it. He didn’t. Secondly, this isn’t a jobs program that would mean anything. Likely, the employees would be teenagers. Teenager income doesn’t do anything but create upward pressure on pricing. (Inflation) Why? Because their wants and needs are already taken care of. Either through the state or the more traditional, parenting. So, any income received, with very few exceptions, goes to frivolity. Care to guess why I-pods carry such a price? Or play stations? Or any other useless gadgets so prevalent throughout our society? Because, the typical teenager’s income is 100% disposable.
It’s Bill Clinton folks . . . . he also thought getting an intern to lip-pock his dicky wasn’t “sex”.
The man is few raisins short of a fruitcake.
I suspect that in fact Most roofs will end up being green. Quite literally, because unless you are prepared to do this annually, mosses and lichens will grow on the roofs (whether black or white), an agin this may be a waste of time and expense. It should be up to the individual to decide.
What is to happend to the scenic patchwork of multicouloured shingle and pantile roofs, which make so many of our urban environs so inofensive to the aesthetic eye., or doesn’t that actually matter anymore ?
Some companies plant grass on the roof. It reduces the roof temperature and provides a great place for corporates execs to practice their golf game.
Mike McMillan says:
July 19, 2011 at 2:10 am> has anyone considered what painting shingles will do to their 30 year warranty?
We had our old roof painted white and the claim by the new roofer was that paint can damage shingles. Our old roof subsequently leaked, but hard to know if it was the paint or the previous owner did things on the cheap (seen in other items around the house). So before painting any roof I would advise understanding what it will do to the existing surface.
Pamela Gray says:
July 19, 2011 at 6:43 am
That said, no one is going to be allowed to dictate to me what color to put on that roof or how much to spend on it. No one.
Clinton is engaging in the two worst actions of liberal politics. He believes in giving tax money away when there is none to give, and growing yet another governmental agency to oversee the new program.
====================================================================
Those are two very bad actions so typical of that political persuasion, but as you alluded to in the previous paragraph, it is the usurpation of liberty which is the most insidious. More often than not, we can see that while they excel at liberty usurpation and they usually accomplish it with our monies. The only thing more despicable is the general public apathy and acceptance towards such actions. But, as we see, much of the slumbering public is awakening to the totalitarian trend.
DJ says:
July 19, 2011 at 6:41 am
From the economic side, one very big point is missing. The supposed energy savings, translates into cost savings, and that translates into lower profits for the power companies.
Your power rates will go up to compensate for the lost revenue. They’re doing that right now here in Reno.
========================================================================
Absolutely. It is what power companies do. This is what occurs when electricity is beyond its normal cost. If this nation is ever to be economically competitive in the global market again, our electricity should be so cheap that is isn’t much of a concern. It wouldn’t be today if we hadn’t had the decades long of continuous opposition to cheap electricity. Imagine what this nation’s industrial output would be if their electric bills were halved or even reduced more! It could and should happen, but it won’t.