Keep Your Roof Cool

Trends in cool roofing, cool roof, cool roofing trend

Save Energy! Save Petrol! Save Electricity! Save Environment! These are some slogans we are hearing since our birth. These slogans doesn’t relate to our birth or birth process or after effects of our birth in anyway. So we can guess these slogans are older than us. These slogans are delivering a very useful advice for the humanity. Think for a moment about the future when all the resources of energy will end. How we will fuel our vehicles? How we will cook and warm our foods? How we will sleep in the night in the absence of fans, coolers and air conditioners? We have to think. None of the energy source is regenerative. One day it will be finished sooner or later.

What can we do? Government bodies and NGOs are advising a lot to save energy. They are suggesting many methods. The costs of fuels have skyrocketed in some past years and our homes are most affected by this steep price hike. In this article we will discuss about some trends in keeping roof of our house cool, so that we may save some energy for our future generations and for the sake of this lovely world.
You must remember energy crisis of 70s that forced roofing industry to find alternative of traditional roofing methods. The same situation is now and these days roofing manufacturers, NGOs, Governments, environmentalists and power companies are trying to find innovative methods to save energy. The aim is to make vegetative roofing and photovoltaic technologies popular. But this may be possible only with the intervention of governments. The governments will have to make these technologies mandatory for all. Vegetative systems also have extra advantage of reduction in sewer-water overflow. .

You must be aware some specific terms about energy if you concern about saving it. One is PED (Peak Energy Demand) that is defined as maximum electricity used by a building or buildings in a specific area to meet their cooling requirements. The PED is an essential factor to know the energy requirements from a power grid. The companies responsible for power supply use this term to guess about the requirement of electricity in a particular area. The PED remains highest in the hottest days of the year. The most of the electricity energy is consumed by air conditioners, refrigerators and water coolers.
In USA a national program named as Energy Star was initiated in 1998 for promoting PED reduction, energy efficiency and environmental activities. The program was focused on energy consuming household items initially. Now it has included building construction components also like windows and roofing. This program has reintroduced two new terms reflectivity and emissivity in the vocabulary of construction and roofing industry.

In our next article “Keep Your Roof Cool (Part-II)” we will discuss about these new terms (a) reflectivity (b) emissivity and their importance about cool roofing