Paint your house instead of installing air conditioning
Smart Home
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What do you do when it's roasting hot outside, and it gets stifling inside your house?
You turn on the air conditioning on, of course.
Now we're used to air conditioning, but it's really not a very elegant solution.
It's expensive to install.
It fails expensively, it's ugly in your yard.
It's noisy, it uses lots of expensive electricity.
What if there was a way to get around that, or at least minimize it, by using paint The original heat control paint is of course white paint.
We know white paint rejects heat better than darker colors.
You gonna want to paint your house white.
There are also these additives.
I don't think most home owners know about.
This one you can add to any paint and they say it's NASA technology.
That always makes me skeptical but let's find out.
This can be added to any color paint, and they say it not rejects heat but it also has an insulation ability.
To keep things warm.
And finally, I've got kind of a semi-pro coating here that already has the UV rejecting components blended into it.
This is an elastomeric coating, which means it's kind of a stretchy, rubbery paint.
All three of these attack the idea of heat rejection differently.
Let's find out which, if any of them, work.
I've got three identical samples of house siding right here.
This is pre-primed Gator Board and I'm gonna paint each one of these with a different one of these paint solutions, let it dry, sit in the sun for a couple hours.
Then we'll use the heat gun to figure out which is rejecting heat better on the front.
And transmitting heat less on the back.
It'll give us some kind of a rule of thumb for how well these work.
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We mixed in the right proportion of the additive for our two-pint sample of paint and thoroughly mixed the other two.
Two coats of each paint went on each sample of siding, was dried, and then put out in the full afternoon sun for two hours in 75 degree weather.
On a laser temperature gun we found the surface temp on the plain paint board was about 73 degrees.
The board painted with the additive enhanced paint was only a degree or two cooler.
And the board with the pre-mixed UV coating was about the same.
Now all of these were much cooler than our cutaway sample of medium brown stucco by almost 30 degrees.
On the back sides of our wood samples, we measured 65, 64, and 64 degrees, respectively.
While the back of our stucco cutaway was 86.
Finally, we painted out half of a real stucco wall with the high end, pre-mixed UV paint and left the other half brown to control for substrate and construction.
Again, a dramatic difference, but nothing in our simple tests indicates that UV blocking white paint does a better job than just plain white paint.
Paint, of course, can do nothing about humidity, which some will point out is missing at least half the picture, certainly in some climates.
Then, there's the color factor.
I'm going to assume that either of those high tech codings we used work better in a white tent, even though they don't have to be.
But, not everybody wants their house white, especially nuclear white.
But, that's probably the most effective.
You've got to make a decision.
