Fluorescent roofing materials keep houses cool in summer and warm in winter: study

Choosing the colour of the roof on your home can impact your electricity bills and your comfort as well as the planet at large.

From up in the sky looking down, rooftops are a large part of the 2–3 per cent of the Earth's surface covered by urban areas.

And the way that big built surface absorbs and reflects light and solar radiation from the Sun can affect not only ambient temperatures in our suburbs, but also global warming.

Black roofs barely reflect any light and absorb a lot of solar radiation, meaning they trap a lot of heat during the day — making your house and neighbourhood hotter.

This heat is then emitted at night, when the ambient temperature cools down, and gets stuck in the Earth's atmosphere.

Lighter colours, on the other hand, can reflect about 80 per cent of sunlight during the day and absorb less radiation.

In commercial development, there's an even higher class of "super cool" materials used on roofs, ranging from synthetic polymers to paints.

These products have upwards of 95 per cent reflectivity, and one group of US scientists has even made a paint so white it reflects about 98 per cent of sunlight.

At that rate, so much solar radiation is emitted back into space, out past the atmosphere, it actually has a cooling effect, and makes the treated surface several degrees cooler than the surrounding air temperature.

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