Q&A - What's the right material to stay cool in the summer?

A homeowner looking for advice about keeping their home cooler in the summer came to the AskARoofer experts for some help!

Many areas can get quite warm in the summertime, especially where this homeowner lives in New Orleans, Louisiana! In an attempt to mitigate the effects of the hot and humid summer, this homeowner, Steve, asked for advice about cool roofing materials:

What are the best cool asphalt shingles on the market? Trying to keep my attic apartment cooler in the summertime heat. Thanks.

One of our expert roofers, Henry Staggs said this in response:

A challenge we have in everything, but especially in roofing especially, you have a lot of products that get very hot. Asphaltic products and whatnot will absorb heat and that heat is then transferred into the building and then it has to be removed through the air conditioning unit which costs money, it's not free to do all that. So we try to do what we can to to resist that, to reflect that. So, we have thermal barriers and shingles and cool coatings and different ways that they can um apply coatings to the granules and the shingles and so forth to reflect heat.

Now GAF and CertainTeed and probably others have shingles that help with that. I don't know that I would say any one of them are better than the other, I don't really know that. But when my mother  had a manufactured home in Oklahoma, where it gets really hot and it gets really cold, she was finding a difference in temperature of almost 15 degrees from one side of her place to the other (it was a big triple-wide thing so it was very large). We did some research then and I found a product that we put on her house and it worked! Will the same product work for you? Well, probably! I hope so, but the a key idea of what to talk about beyond the shingle is the underlayment.

On the underlayment, I want to talk about this part called Polaralum. There are other products like this, but this has a foil back on it and a bright white surface on the other. When we put this on my mom's house, it was a little pricey, it evened out the temperature consistently across her place and it helped bring down her energy cost. This product is from Heat Barrier Systems Inc. I don't know anything about that company really and I only use this product that one time, but it definitely did work when I did use it, so it might be something worth looking at. I know that Beacon Supply carries this too. You can probably find it at most any other supplier. 

I hope that helps, my name is Henry I have about maybe more than 30 years experience, I'd say almost 40 and I contribute to different publications and I've earned a whole stack of credentials (they're in a box right now, I don't have anywhere to hang them in this little place I'm in right now but as soon as I get a wall I'm putting them back up). That's about it. So I hope you guys have a good day and if you do decide to use it, how about do us a favor reach back out to AskARoofer and let everybody know what your experience with the product was because that will kind of help us as well to make better recommendations to people in the future.

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