Where Roofing And Air Conditioning Intersect
Keeping your air conditioning bills down is critical if you have a tight budget. Choosing a highly efficient air conditioning system will help to keep your costs down, but it won't be enough on its own. An AC system has to contend with heat gain. The more heat that enters your home, the more your air conditioner has to work. So if you take steps to prevent heat from entering your home, you can help your AC system to run even more efficiently. For example, using energy-efficient roofing on your home can help to decrease heat gain and keep your costs down.
What Type of Roofing Is Energy Efficient?
When you are looking for energy-efficient roofing, you need to look for a material that will reflect heat away from your home. Unfortunately, the most common material on the market, asphalt shingles, will not help you. Asphalt absorbs sunlight and converts it to heat. The hotter your roof gets, the more heat it will allow to seep into your home. On the other hand, a material like metal will reflect heat away from your home, which will help to keep your AC bills down.
How Much Can You Save with Metal Roofing?
Reflectivity is important. While metal will reflect the sun's energy away from your home, it will still heat up. When metal heats up, it will retain heat. This heat can then pass into your home. If you want to reduce the amount of heat that enters your home, you need to look for metal roofing that has been treated with a highly emissive coating. An emissive coating will allow heat to escape from your roof. Most of this heat will escape into the atmosphere. A good metal roof will help you to reduce your AC bills by up to 25%.
If you are thinking about buying a metal roof for your home, you need to know that not every metal roof is made the same. A bare metal roof will have the highest reflectivity, but sunlight reflecting off of your roof can reflect heat and light, which can cause light pollution and, in some cases, burning. A roof that is treated with an emissive coating will cover up the natural reflectivity of the roof with an innocuous color. Not only will this type of roof cover up the nasty glare of the sun, but it will help to keep your cooling costs low, which is always a good thing.
Talk to a company like Central Aire Conditioning to learn about other ways to reduce your cooling bills.