Here’s an excerpt from RDI’s website:

The Resilient Design Institute is a nonprofit organization focused on integrating resilience into building design, land-use planning, infrastructure, and food systems throughout North America. With growing incidence of storms, flooding, drought, wildfire, and other interruptions or disturbances, resilience is becoming a national imperative for keeping people safe in both the near-term and long-term.

Resilient design is an increasingly important concept as building owners are beginning to understand that the operating, planned maintenance, and unplanned maintenance budgets of a building can be much higher than the initial building costs and are making more decisions with that in mind.  GAF has championed performance based product standards and is a founding sponsor of the Resilient Design Institute. 

This is an interesting and evolving area, and I hope that you will join the discussion as well.  Have you heard of the topic of resilience before?  Any thoughts?

PS we even had a little fun in Nashville too!

As you might guess, the issue is complex, and you can’t make a blanket statement about cool roofing that will apply to every structure.  A data center in a cold climate like Winnipeg may benefit from a cool roof, because the servers generate so much internal heat.  And cooling is typically harder to do, from a thermodynamic point of view (cooling a building by one degree with conventional equipment takes approximately three times the energy that heating by one degree takes, and is usually done with more expensive energy—e.g., electric instead of natural gas).  Conversely, an industrial space with very large internal heating needs in a southern climate may be a candidate for a heat-absorbing roof. 

In short, the building’s intended use and site are major factors and the question is not simple.  To get you started in determining if a cool roof is right for your commercial building, here are some questions to consider:

Will it lower my energy bills?  There are a number of cool roof energy calculators, including GAF’s CREST (which is based on DOE’s CoolCalc and CoolCalcPeak) that will help answer this question.  Projections are only as good as the data you put in, and should be used for comparison purposes only.  However, generally speaking, if your building is in warmer climate zones (1-3 and usually 4); you have expensive electricity (and high demand charges); and you have older, inefficient air conditioning equipment; you’ll likely realize savings.  If you don’t have much roof insulation, the savings will be greater.  (Remember that all a cool roof can do is help provide savings in energy usage.  If rates go up, the bills will go up - but then of course so will the savings.)

Should I just add more insulation?  Additional insulation lessens the energy savings effect of membrane reflectivity and emissivity.  As a rule of thumb, above R-30, a cool roof will have a much smaller contribution to savings, but membrane reflectivity is a net plus or minus on the roof no matter how much insulation there is (if a cool roof helps with no insulation, it will not hurt with a lot of insulation).  System cost may be reduced by using cool roofing together with less insulation, if appropriate.  However, as always, it all depends on the building and its use. 

Do I have a high demand charge?  Increasingly, electrical billing is about the peaks.  Peaks in electrical usage force expensive electrical grid upgrades.  Peak usage tends to occur on the hottest days of the year.  To capture and bill for those peaks, electrical billing structures are more and more finely detailed, and capture the cost of peaks in a demand charge.  Demand charges as high as $900 per kilowatt hour are not unheard of.   This means that a cool roof, which can help shave off peak demand by keeping the building cooler on the hottest days of the year (or even just by moving peak load later in the day when demand charges may be lower), can make a lot more sense than you might guess in a northern city like Boston.

What is the condition of my roofing system?  Insulation that’s wet has an R value of -0-.  That means that a full removal (a “full rip” or “tear off” in industry lingo) will have benefits beyond what any calculator will project.

What’s my building’s use?  Roofing assemblies, particularly those that have insulation below deck and no vapor retarder, can sometimes handle vapor drive and high vapor loads just by overheating.  Switching to a cool roof may expose the need for additional vapor retarders and/or some above deck insulation, particularly if there is a large vapor load, such as from a commercial laundry.  This is an advanced roofing system design question.

Should I care about the Urban Heat Island Effect?  If you’re just trying to lower your utility bill, the Urban Heat Island Effect is not a consideration. However, if you’re pursuing a LEED®, Energy Star® or Green Globes® rating for your building, site factors such as Urban Heat Islands are a consideration.  And an owner who is thinking of selling in a few years should consider the membrane reflectivity and these broader concerns when they make their roofing choice, since it could impact future sales price.

Are there other benefits to a cool roof for my structure?  There is some support for the idea that reduced temperature swings will lengthen the life of a roofing system and even a building.  It has also been shown that solar PV panels are more efficient when they are cooler - so if a PV project is in your future, a cool roof can be a good choice. 

Are there other building considerations that trump reflectivity?  I feel that highly reflective TPO is a great solution for most roofs, but it is important to remember that the roof’s primary job is to keep water out of the building.  Certain types of facilities may be better served by different roofs types.  It should not be overlooked that our traditional multi-ply asphaltic roofs have a history of great performance as well, and are available with high reflectivity and high emissivity.   

What’s clear is that there is a right roof for every structure – and re-roofing is a phenomenal opportunity to improve your building’s energy performance.  These questions, and many others, should lead to an interesting and dynamic conference! 

Cool roofing products are classified, in many cases, by their Solar Reflectance Index (SRI). 

So, just what is SRI?   It stands for Solar Reflectance Index, which is a combination of two numbers, a material’s emissivity (a measure of how effectively it rejects heat) and reflectivity (how much light energy it bounces back). 

Essentially, it is a way to estimate how hot something will get in the sun. 

Higher numbers mean cooler surfaces.  Numbers from 20 to 90 are typical, but it’s interesting to note that SRI can be more than 100. In fact, this is fairly is common for highly reflective products with high emissivity, for example light colored asphaltic membranes like GAF EnergyCap.

However, color is not always a reliable indicator of solar reflectance, because visible light only represents 47% of the energy in the solar spectrum.  SRI takes into account the entire spectrum and much of the light energy is non-visible infrared light.  High emissivity combined with a pigment technology that preferentially rejects infrared light allows products like Timberline Cool Series Shingles to achieve high relatively high SRI values - even though the shingles do not appear white to the human eye.

An interesting factoid is that another three-letter abbreviation we all know, SPF, for sunscreen, refers only to the ability to block UV light.  UV light is only about 3% of the energy in the spectrum.

If you'd like to compare potential energy savings from switching to cool roofing, try our Cool Roof Energy and Sustainability Tool (CREST) at cool.gaf.com.

So that I could eliminate this worry and watch and set the building interior temperature remotely, I recently ran a comparison of wireless thermostats to pick the best one for my application.

I have used, residentially, a 3M/Filtrete/Homewerks thermostat for some time.  Since I’ve had a good experience with it, I ordered one for my commercial building.  I also ordered a Cyberstat from Motison.  The units would need to control a Flo-Aire air handler style natural gas fired furnace (which operates with conventional thermostat wiring).

The Homewerks unit has a flashier app-style interface but is more complex to set up, requiring a broadcast connection to the home server for configuration.  It also seemed to experience more problems with the extended range from the wireless router.  By contrast, the Cyberstat uses a unique device ID for setup (meaning it is actually labeled inside the box with an individual device ID).  For me, this made it much easier to configure and I was able to hook it up and begin watching it online basically right away.

Here’s a screenshot of the Cyberstat temperature programming interface: 

In my case, I am happier with the Cyberstat and feel like it began saving me money immediately - by making sure a manually changed setpoint did not persist over the weekend, when I keep the building at a lower temperature.  However, either device can work well in either home or business applications.

And don’t forget, old thermostats should never be thrown away.  In fact, I got five bucks each for the old mercury thermostats I recycled! 

Find a place to recycle your old thermostats here.

And has anyone found a better way to optimize building temperature?

1.  Cardboard - it has value, more than $100 / ton generally.  Try to get it separated out so it can be recycled.  A little tape or staples are OK.  They make it into a kind of soup to prepare the fibers when recycling and those things will be screened out.

2.  Packaging - it can be hard to tell #3 PVC, which although technically recyclable, most places don't take; from #1 PET which is more widely recycled.  I took this picture to try to show the difference.  PVC is naturally slightly yellowish, so a little blue pigment is often added in manufacturing to counteract that.   You can see that blue pigment when you crease it.

I’m sure they did it to avoid the cost of the landfill, and it’s true it would have cost $80-100 to throw them away. But what they didn’t know is, I recycled all these shingles for just $26. The point is, post-consumer shingles have value for recycling into pavement, and that means you can save money by recycling them.

Of course all you pros out there have dump trailers, as opposed to me who had to shovel them out of my trailer by hand!

Clearly there is significant heat escaping from the garage, preventing frost from forming on the roof.  The garage in these homes is usually unheated, and there’s no attic in the garage, so what’s going on? 

Most likely, the adjoining wall was considered an interior wall when the home was built.  So they didn’t insulate it well, if at all.  Heat from the kitchen is flowing through that wall, only to be wasted warming the garage roof.  And there’s probably no insulation or air barrier under that attic roof at all.  If there was a heavy snow load, this house could be looking at ice dams.

Using frost as a diagnostic tool is not an option all the time, but roofing contractors with the right training, such as RESNET EnergySmart training from GAF, can easily recognize these symptoms and others like them.  There’s no better time than when the roof is off to fix attic or wall energy issues.  Your crew is up there anyway, with great access to the attic from above.  And energy work is great, because your client will see the results in the first year, realizing that your services made a difference. 

Have you started offering attic energy review services?  Do you agree with my diagnosis of this home’s energy situation?

#5:  Green Building Codes and Rating Systems.  Everyone’s heard of LEED®, but now it’s influencing the building code, and creating competition with other rating systems – all of which has led to the International Green Construction Code, and growth in other rating systems such as Green Globes, Passiv Haus, Earth Craft, etc.  This is creating a major market shift.

#4:  Roofing Materials Recycling.  While the percentage of roofing materials that get recycled is still too low, market growth is very strong.  Industry players - notably RCI and AIA - are driving recycling, and professional roofing contractors are participating in it for the green positioning and because it can save money. 

#3: Cool Roofing.  As we know, everybody wants to be green – but they want it to be easy.  And the great thing about cool roofing is, it’s pretty easy.  This trend is sweeping the world, not just North America.  There’s lots of reasons for this, but in my view, one of them is the science is pretty easy to understand – everyone has experienced first hand that light colors stay cooler.  And in most cases, there is little to no upcharge for a cool roof, so you can get a benefit for little to no cost.

#2: Solar Ready Roofing. It’s hard to make propane on a roof. But you can make electricity and hot water, and most buildings use electricity and hot water!  And roofs are perfect for solar.  So even if you’re not installing renewable energy at the time of the roof install, more and more projects are looking at making the roof ‘Solar Ready’.  California is even requiring new roofs to be ready for solar. 

#1 Give your Company the Green Edge.  The approach here is to work to position yourself and your business more effectively within the green marketplace - in general, this means focusing on cool roofing, roof maintenance, and sustainability.  A great way to start is by pursuing a green designation such as GAF Sustainable Roofing Council membership, which provides a template for ‘getting into green’ and will help make sure you have the latest information on sustainability trends.  It’s also important to walk the talk by performing an office and jobsite waste audit, and to set up a membrane recycling program.  You can also network with other green professionals by joining your local USGBC chapter; and measure your efforts by submitting a job for Roofpoint rating.

These trends are very strong.  You can look at them as either an opportunity or a threat, but GAF is investing to make sure we are ready for these changes, and we are ready to work with you to help you take advantage of them as well. 

What do you think?  Do you see these trends within your own business?  Do you have some more ideas for ‘green positioning’? 

And with the summer heat, I was running the fans and the air handlers all the time to keep everybody comfortable.  It was clear something needed to be done.  I looked at a few options, including going over the roof with a Z-profile and new metal; filling the flutes and recovering with a single ply membrane; and an engineered roof coating. Topcoat really seemed like the best choice.

One of the things that I really liked was that the Topcoat team was familiar with all of the unusual details of the roof and how to approach them.  The building was added onto in stages, and it created some areas that seemed to leak no matter what we did.  There’s a full line of Topcoat products which are applicable to pretty much every detail on the roof.   Plus the liquid fabric product eliminates the time-consuming application of fabric at horizontal seams, and tubes of sealant are handy for particular problem areas.

Looking at it from the property owner’s point of view, the Topcoat coating is a great choice – I had it professionally done by Elco Painting and it’s going to last.  From a sustainability point of view, a high solids elastomeric like Topcoat really works too.  It’s a cool, reflective roof that’s already saving me energy costs, and it will keep my tenants more comfortable too (I have to say this effect is really remarkable.  In direct sun, if you put your hand on the coated area, it’s cool – not just ‘not hot’, but cool.  On the galvanized metal, it’s too hot to leave your hand on comfortably).  So the new roof is not only going to keep my tenants dry, but it’s also keeping them cooler.  And we didn’t waste anything to do it.  We were able to add to the service life of the existing roof using very little new material and disposing of very little old material, so I like it from a sustainability point of view.

I’m pleased the tenants will be a little cooler and more comfortable.  And as the property owner, I’m saving energy, making the asset last longer, restoring and preserving the roof, and keeping the people that pay the bills happy.  This was my first experience with roof restoration, has anyone else tried this?

J. Carnes & Son is a GAF Master Elite and Certified Green Roofer.  They have been recycling for several years now, most recently with RASTech in Brentwood, NH.  From the post-consumer shingles, RASTech produces a variety of specialized road repair materials such as pothole repair and cold patch repair.  The recycling service is quick and convenient, and Jay rarely gets a flat tire – those are the big reasons for working with them!

I arrived on the roofing job just as the crew was attaching the safety anchor points at the peak of the roof.  From there the crew removed the remainder of the ridge vents, installed protective mesh over the side of the house, and tarped the landing area.  Once the protective material was in place, the tear-off proceeded quickly. 

Jay’s crew is used to recycling.  It takes only slightly more work, essentially some minor separation of materials on the ground.  The shingle recycler wants shingles, felt and nails only – no other trash, and especially no rotted wood.  Also, recycling generally doesn’t cost any more.  In fact, for J. Carnes & Son, recycling is slightly cheaper, in per ton dumping costs.  That savings is probably offset when the small amount of extra labor to separate materials is considered, but there are also other benefits to recycling.

The homeowner on this job, a police officer, shared with me that he selected Jay’s company because he wanted someone reputable - a company that would be around.  Recycling was not a specific driver for him, but it added to his positive impression of Jay’s company, since he knew that a fly-by-nighter company was not as likely to offer recycling.

All in all, a great day on the roof, and I even took some video that I hope to post soon.  Have you tried recycling on some of your jobs?  There is much more work to be done to make it standard practice, but it’s really remarkable when you think about it – 100% of the shingle gets recycled, and it doesn’t take any government grants.

Note that I am encouraging those of us in the roofing industry to say ‘post-consumer shingles’ rather than ‘tear-off shingles’.  I believe this will help us tell a more positive story about the growth in post-consumer asphalt shingle recycling.  Think we can do it?  I do.