How to Keep Your Building Cooler in Summer

In the summertime, there is one thought constantly looming large over building owners, facility managers, and homeowners alike: How to keep your building cooler. It’s a constant battle against the sun to keep the inside of your facility at a comfortable temperature. In the dead of winter, we welcome the warmth of the sun. But in the summer, it becomes overwhelming. Luckily, in silicone roof coatings, the sun may have finally met its match. 

 

An obvious way to keep your building cooler is to keep the hot air out. When your AC is pumping out cold air, only to have it mixing with hot air that has snuck in, your building is going to get hot. It becomes a huge waste of money and energy. The AC is running only to keep up or to keep the building “cool enough”, not to keep it comfortable. So how can you keep hot air outside and cool air inside? A silicone roof coating. 

 

Silicone roof coatings are among the most highly reflective roofing materials on the market. Their white color, along with their chemistry, allow them to reflect nearly 90% of all UV rays back into the atmosphere. What does this mean for you? Heat is reflected away from your building, rather than being absorbed into it. This can lower your roof temperature significantly, by over 60 degrees on a hot day. A cooler roof temperature translates into a cooler interior building temperature. Heat is constantly transferred between the roof and the building and a hot roof can greatly increase the temperature inside. Depending on the climate your building occupies, you can decrease your total energy usage by up to 20% when you install a silicone roof coating.

 

Another obvious way to keep your building cooler is to keep the cold air in. While silicone doesn’t help with this much (it does help a small amount, but not enough to merit consideration), a well-insulated roof is what you need. Our spray foam roofing products are the best insulating roofing material available. They offer higher R-value (insulating power) than any other roofing system. Having spray foam installed on your roof has a doubling effect on keeping your building cooler because it can also be coated with a silicone coating. Now you have the reflective power of silicone AND the insulating power of spray foam. 

 

We’ve written about this elsewhere, but we always like to mention the winter penalty when touting reflectivity. It’s true that in the winter when you’re trying to heat your building, you appreciate the sun’s rays helping you out and heating your building up. But there are 3 reasons why the winter penalty is outweighed by the benefits of reflectivity in the summer:

 

In the winter, the sun’s rays come in at an angle. This indirect approach to your building makes the rays less intense, and therefore they heat your building up more in summer than in winter. 

 

Not only is the sunlight less potent in winter, but there’s just less of it. in summer, you might get 14, almost 15 hours of sunlight in a day. In winter, this gets down as low as 9 hours. that means in July you’re looking at 6 additional hours of more potent sunlight when compared to January.

 

It’s easier to heat your building up than to cool it down. It costs less to heat your building up that to cool it down. It is faster to heat your building up than to cool it down. You don’t need help heating your building up; you need help cooling it down. 

 

You can keep your building cooler in the summer in a number of ways: installing silicone roof coatings, installing spray foam roofing, running your AC more, getting energy efficient windows, etc. But the most cost-effective, long-term solution is a silicone roof coating. They naturally keep your building cooler from the moment they are installed, and they do it for less than half the cost of other roofing systems.