Heat-Reflective Paint & Going Green
If you live in Sydney, you will know how much sun we get. In fact, it is over 2,500 peak sun hours a year. With this in mind, we recently installed solar panels and painted the roof with heat-reflective paint. I have to admit that we were one of the last on the street to install them. Neighbours had gone on for years about saving the planet and green energy etc., but I was too sceptical. It wasn’t until the last round of bill increases that I saw the light. (No pun intended).
I was at a neighbour’s Barbie (BBQ), and we were moaning about the rising cost of our bills. A few neighbours were comparing their bills, and I realised that even the ones who had a few kids (I live with my wife and no kids) were paying much less than I was. This is because their solar panels nearly covered their electricity usage. That was it! I decided right then and there to install solar panels.
How Can Roof Tile Paint Save You Money?
While researching solar panels, I came across articles about heat-reflective paint, a type of paint specially formulated to reflect heat away from a surface. Heat-reflective paint works by reflecting the sun’s infrared radiation away from the surface, thus reducing the amount of heat absorbed. I realised that this roof paint would go hand in hand with my solar panels.
We both work from home, so we have the air conditioning blasting all day, every day. It is the only way we can stay focused on our work. So a massive chunk of our electricity bill is running our air conditioning in summer. If heat-reflective paint reduces the amount of heat entering our property, it will seriously reduce our energy costs.
I googled ‘heat reflective paint near me’ and came across Solution Industries' website. Their prices looked very competitive, but I checked out a few more paint stores in the Sydney area. It turned out that Solution Industries sold Sheildcoat Thermobond heat reflective paint cheaper than the rest.
This roof paint reflects up to 30% of the heat away from roofs and walls! This means it can reduce the internal temperature of a house by up to 30%. Impressive, eh? It also has good emissivity, which means that it releases build-up heat quickly after the sun has gone down.
According to the brochure:
Thermobond HRC reflects 57% of solar infrared and 40% of visible rays from the sun, plus air conditioning costs can be reduced by 20% per annum.
It is also easy to maintain and is environmentally friendly. If you want to satisfy your inner geek, here is a good review of heat-reflective paints.
That was all I needed to hear. I was ready to go down to the store and saw free shipping! By this time, I already had a few more items in my shopping cart, so this was ideal, as it would save my back. I also bought a Hopper spray gun to apply the roof tile paint. I told my wife about it, and she worried about me going up on the roof to paint it. She told me to look into getting roof anchor points installed; this was going to be a bigger job than I had imagined.
1 Job Turns Into 3
After a lot of arguing (I mean discussing) with the better half, she finally convinced me to install roof anchor points. I contacted a few companies and got a good quote from a reputable firm. After they had been to check out my roof, they told me that I had quite a lot of damage up there, and they thought it was probably leaking. We had storms in Sydney last winter, and one of our trees fell on the roof. I had been up on the ladder and looked, but I couldn’t see any damage.
That evening I went into the attic, and sure enough, there had been a leak. Fortunately, I caught it early, and it was just the underlay that was damaged. However, it could have been a much more expensive ordeal. So, I called a roof repair specialist that a neighbour recommended, and they came around and gave me a quote; this was turning into an expensive ride!
The logical way to go about it was to install roof anchors, fix the roof, and then apply the heat-reflective paint. As luck had it, the roof anchor point specialists also did roof repairs, so I killed those two birds with one stone. I decided to paint the roof myself now that I had the anchor points installed. It didn’t take as long as I had initially thought it would. The spray gun really made the application very easy. Then, of course, I allowed five days for the roof paint to dry thoroughly before I had the solar panels installed.