Eco-Friendly Ways To Cool Your House Down By Reflecting Sunlight

The problem with a lot of conventional approaches to cooling your house is that they tend to be bad for the environment. Air conditioning uses an enormous amount of energy, and it's also bad for the environment in other ways as well since chemicals like Freon often contribute to global warming even more than carbon dioxide. Here are a few ways you can get general contractors to upgrade your home to be more eco-friendly by reflecting sunlight.

Cool Roofing

The way your house gets hot in the first place is generally through sunlight hitting it. During the summer especially, this sunlight can be excessive and cause your house to be too hot. One approach you can use to fix this problem without relying only on air conditioning is by using cool roof technology. This works by adding highly reflective material to the roof of your house. After all, this is where most of the sunlight is going to hit. It's possible to lower the temperature of your roof by as much as 50 degrees this way.

A cooler roof will mean a cooler house without any energy expended. This reflective material can come in the form of reflective shingles, reflective tiles, an entire sheet covering or just a specific type of reflective paint.

Electrochromic Smart Glass

Besides your roof, the other area that sunlight is going to hit is your windows. Sunlight coming in through your windows can cause your house to heat up when you don't want it to do so. But the traditional alternative—just keeping blinds closed so that your house is always dark—is hardly ideal either. Plus, blinds often let in some heat anyway.

Fortunately, there's now another option: electrochromic smart glass. This glass can become opaque when an electric charge is applied across it. The glass is normally transparent, but it can turn blue over the course of a couple of minutes when you apply a charge. The glass works by causing lithium ions in the center of the glass to scatter throughout the glass when they are charged electrically. The ions then reflect sunlight coming from the outside, making the glass look blue. You don't actually need to keep electricity flowing. It's only needed to change the glass from one state to the other.

The glass can reflect 98 percent of incoming sunlight when it's in its opaque state. Some sources estimate that this could help you save at least 8 percent on energy cost for the entire building, all by just reflecting sunlight.

For more information, contact a contractor like Matrix Construction Ltd.

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