Human ingenuity continues to solve problems, like increased energy use, with elegant solutions such as this one, cool colors.
An excerpt
Energy savings hit the roof
'Cool' colors that reflect heat now top some houses
By Edie Lau -- Bee Staff WriterPublished 12:01 am PDT Monday, August 14, 2006
The houses on Mariah Place look largely the same -- two stories, tidy and new, with buff-colored stucco exteriors and brown roofs.
But two of the houses on the small court in Fair Oaks have a distinguishing, if not distinguishable, feature: Their brown roofs are painted with pigments that absorb a lot less heat of the sun than your standard brown.
These "cool-colored" roofs are in the vanguard of high-tech energy-efficient roofing materials coming into vogue in California and beyond.
"This is (part of) a wave," said Chris Scruton, a project manager in the California Energy Commission's research program in building energy efficiency. "The whole notion of the 'green' building is something that's just taken on a life of its own."
The Mariah Place houses, located just off Sunrise Boulevard, are part of a study by Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories and funded by the Energy Commission to explore how well the cool colors work.
The data show they do.
The scientists have been comparing the two cool-roofed houses against identical houses on the same street with roofs colored by conventional pigments.
On typical hot summer afternoons, they found the temperature in the attic of the house with cool-brown concrete tiles between 5.4 and 9 degrees cooler than the attic of the house with regular brown concrete tiles.
The effect is even greater in the second demonstration house, which has metal shingles painted a cool brown. Its attic temperature was 9 to 12.6 degrees cooler than its counterpart's.
