Anyone in business will tell you 17% is a big number. Imagine if the economy suddenly jumped 17%, or the interest rate, or the jobless rate went down 17%. There would be either rioting or partying in the streets!
What would happen if your kid’s grades suddenly changed 17%? That’s a grade and a half, or more. I’m just saying you don’t just blow off that kind of change like nothing happened, or they got lucky. Something substantial is going on to get that kind of change.
Normal Reflective Roof Results
So when I ran across this article, I knew something was up. Durability and Design (www.durabilityanddesign.com) released an ebook titled, “Reflective Roof Coatings”. It’s a series of articles put together from earlier publications. It’s a good resource that hits the highlights of reflective roof coatings. One of the articles, “Roof-Coatings Study Builds Knowledge Base on Performance Questions” by Walter Scarborough, HALL Building Information Group LLC., reported on a research initiative conducted by the Reflective Roof Coatings Institute, or RRCI (www.therrci.org).
Their three year mission was to determine if the methods used by certifying organizations provided fair and accurate results for all coatings in most conditions. To spoil the surprise, the answer is yes. But along the way some other interesting things were learned.
One of the most interesting is this.
1. Reflectivity reduction. In Figure 2, the summary shown in Figure 1 is divided according to the three coating chemistries. Notice the slope of all three curves is essentially the same with the majority of the solar reflectivity loss occurring in the first year. From about 85% to 70% for three years. An 18% performance drop with a steady rate of decline.
This is not the case with Super Therm. Energy Star test results showed only a 0.6% drop in reflectivity over three years. From 80% to 79.4%, a 0.01% drop. (Check it out for yourself at http://www.energystar.gov/certified-products/detail/roof_products) Is a 17% performance increase important to you? If it was put it this chart it would be a flat line.
Taking this a step further, in 2006, the Building Materials Test Center in Japan tested Super Therm after being on a roof in western Kansas for 15 years and found a 73% SRI. That’s a miniscule 8% reduction after 15 years. And it’s still higher than the competition’s 3 year score. An infrared reflector was added in 2000, which will increase this score.
It gets better. In comparing it with latex paint, “The thermal energy necessary to heat or cool the building coated with Super Therm was 26% less“. That was the conclusion of the Florida Energy Office’s study of 7,250 data points collected over 24 hours on a cloudy day in Denver, Colorado.
You would be crazy to not check this out. Your kid bringing home C’s on the old report card suddenly starts popping A’s and you don’t blink an eye? OK, I’m not one to judge. But you could be missing out on something big!