Gadgetory

what are you doing it's roasting hot outside and it gets stifling inside your house you turn on the air conditioning 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 that white paint rejects heat better than darker colors and you got to want to paint your house white there are also these additives I don't think most homeowners know about this one you can add to any paint they say it's NASA technology it always makes me skeptical but let's find out this can be added to any color paint and they say it not only rejects heat but it also has an insulation ability to keep things warm and finally I've got a kind of a semi-pro coating here that already has the UV rejecting components blend it 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 one 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 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 and 75 degree web 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 backsides 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 coatings we used work better in a white tint even though they don't have to be but not everybody wants their house white especially new clear white but that's probably the most effective you got to make a decision