Your building receives numerous benefits from the reflectivity that a silicone roof coating provides. Decreased energy costs, lower interior temperatures in the summer, longer roof life, and longer AC unit life. Each of these benefits saves you money and gives you peace of mind that only a silicone roof coating can provide.
Decreased Energy Costs with Silicone Roof Coatings
Thanks to their reflectivity, silicone roof coatings prevent your building from absorbing UV rays. Reflecting these UV rays back into the atmosphere means your building naturally stays cooler, and therefore your AC unit can run less. Cooling a building is one of the most energy-reliant tasks in facility management, and reducing the workload on you AC unit saves you serious money. In fact, studies have shown that reflective roof coatings cut cooling expenses by up to 50%! Imagine taking the energy required to run your AC units in the summer, and just cut it in half. This will greatly decrease your energy bill and will also reduce the wear and tear experienced by your AC unit.
A roof with a reflective coating installed reflects up to 88% of UV rays, while an uncoated roof will ABSORB 83% of those UV rays.
Lower Interior Temperatures
On top of the money-saving benefits provide by silicone roof coatings, they also keep your building cooler and more comfortable in the summer. Customers report that the non-climate controlled areas of their building are 15-20 degrees cooler on summer days. 15-20 degrees! That’s a really significant difference. Think about when you come home and your home is 1 degree warmer than usual, you notice almost immediately. 15-20 degrees in a work environment is a major difference! On top of being more comfortable, science tells us that workers who are too hot are less productive, and workers who are kept comfortable (such as with a silicone roof coating) are more productive.
![This roof is half coated and half uncoated. You can see how much sunlight is reflected on the wall of the building over the coated section.](https://progmat2017.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_8649-300x225.jpg)
Silicone Roof Coatings Provide Longer Roof Life
UV rays are the single most degrading force that your roof will face during its life. There is simply nothing more devastating than the power of the sun. Sure, major weather events may come along and damage sections of the roof, but those are generally very rare. However, your building faces the degrading forces of the sun almost every day. You don’t have to sit and watch the sun deteriorate your roof, though. You can fight the effects of UV rays with a reflective roof coating.
Longer AC Life
Air conditioning units are not a cheap line item in your budget. They’re certainly not something that you want to replace more often than absolutely necessary. Roofs without a silicone roof coating, and therefore minimal reflectivity, force their AC units to work harder, and fail sooner. Installing a silicone roof coating allows your AC unit to work less in the summer, and last longer. This is yet another way that silicone roof coatings can save you money thanks to their reflectivity.
Dealing with the Winter Penalty
There is one downfall to a reflective roof coating, called the winter penalty. This basically means that in the winter you want your building to be heated up by the sun to allow your heating unit to work less, and keep your building at a more comfortable temperature. This is a true effect that does exist, reflective coatings do have a bit of a winter penalty. However, The winter penalty is not as severe as opponents of reflective roof coatings would like you to believe for several reasons.
Indirect sunlight
During winter months, the sun doesn’t rise as high in the sky as it does in the summer in most regions. The UV rays experienced in the winter come in at more of an angle, rather than the direct rays seen in the summer. Direct rays do more to heat your building in the summer than indirect rays do in the winter. So, while UV rays in the winter can still heat your building a little bit, they aren’t as severe as UV rays in the summer.
Shorter days
There are more hours of sunlight in the summer than in the winter. Your building has significantly more time to be heated up in the summer than it does in the winter. This aspect alone means that reflective roof coatings are more beneficial in the summer than they are in the winter.
Easier to heat your building
If the intensity of the UV rays were the same in summer and winter (which they aren’t), and if the length of days in teh summer and winter were the same (which they aren’t), there would still be one more reason to not worry about the winter penalty of reflective roof coatings for too long. This reason is that it’s significantly easier to heat your building in the winter than to cool it in the summer. Heating your building takes a small, contained fire inside the unit. But cooling it requires chemicals to be dispatched at the correct temperature, at the correct rate, at the correct time. Heating your building is easy, cooling it is hard and more expensive.
Reflective Roof Coatings and Your Building
If a reflective roof coating sounds like something you’d like to have installed on your building, give us a call today. We’ll check out your roof and make sure it’s a candidate for a reflective roof coating. We’ll then work with you every step of the way to make sure you have a great roof that you’re happy with.