Understanding Roof Restoration Episode 11 - Reflective Roofs & Energy Efficiency: Why it Matters - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Greg Hlavaty and Hal Leland from Western Colloid. You can read the transcript below, listen to the podcast or watch the webinar.

Karen Edwards: Hello and welcome to the Understanding Roof Restoration Podcast. I'm your host, Karen Edwards, from askaroofer.com. The Understanding Roof Restoration Podcast dives deep into the topic of restoring roofs. As the popularity of roof restoration continues to grow among building owners and contractors, there are many questions that arise. With a wide variety of roofing systems on existing buildings and many available restoration options, we turn to the experts at Western Colloid to answer your questions on roof restoration. Greg Hlavaty, Hal Leland, and the team at Western Colloid have been manufacturing and installing these systems for more than 50 years, and they have seen it all. We will tackle a different topic each month and answer questions submitted by you, our listeners.

Hello everyone. I am Karen Edwards from AskARoofer. And I'm excited to welcome back to the program Greg Hlavaty and Hal Leland from Western Colloid. Welcome, gentlemen.

Hal Leland: Good to be here.

Karen Edwards: Great. Always great to have you on. And we are going to be talking this month about, for understanding roof restoration, why someone might want to upgrade for energy efficiency and why it can make such a big difference for their building. So let's talk a little bit about why putting on a fluid applied roofing system on an existing building can really change the energy efficiency of that building. Why is that?

Greg Hlavaty: Well, first of all, most of our roofs, if not all of our roofs for the past 40 years, have been reflective surface roofs, which is maybe a little bit different than most other companies. Almost everybody's gotten on the bandwagon in the last 10 to 12 years, 15 years, that, hey, we need cool reflective roofs. We were always reflective. In the early days, it was our water-based aluminum. But even as early as the mid to late '70s, we were putting white acrylic roofs on. So it's always been a thing for us because it does two things. It's, energy efficiency is key. And that's a hot topic these days with energy crisis, energy issues worldwide, everybody's looking at that. But it's also the energy efficiency or the reflectivity of the roof membrane itself. There's just no question that a roof membrane lasts longer if it's got a reflective coating and it doesn't have to do as much work. It doesn't have to fight the thermal shock, the high heat, high temperature.

A cap sheet roof, a gray granulated cap sheet roof on a Southern California day at 85 or 90 degrees, the surface temperature of that roof can get up to 150, 160, 170 degrees depending on direction of the sun and how long it's exposed to the sun. And that means that roof membrane, and we're not even talking about the energy of the building yet, we're just talking about the membrane itself, that membrane heats up, it expands, it swells. Everything that happens to any kind of a substance when you heat it and then it drops down, if you're coastal, it drops down into the low 50s, high 40s at night. And that is a thermal shock. That's the expansion contraction on a metal roof, on any type of roof, a built-up roof. And so it's just good for that membrane and that membrane just lasts longer if you put a good reflective coating on. The UV doesn't burn out. If it's an asphalt roof, asphalt only lasts so long under UV. It burns out and the reflectivity keeps that out of the way.

So that's all the practical things of parts of the membrane. And that's not just us, that's every membrane out there. Almost all the single-plies are white except for EPDM. And even EPDM, which is not used widely in the hot climate areas, but that even has a UV barrier. It's not white, it's black. They put a black pigment in it to keep the sun from eating that, eating the EPDM rubber out. But it's important. So that saves the owner money. That means that he's not re-roofing as often.

That was always the early part of our reflectivity. And so we just naturally phased into the energy crisis. So when the state of California, who leads the pack for the whole nation in energy laws and requirements for buildings and what have you, they started their tests back in 2003, I think, somewhere in that range, and started monitoring buildings with reflective roofs and non-reflective roofs. And they were given rebates at the time. You could get a rebate. If you put a reflective coating on your roof, you could get a good portion of that rebated back to you. And what they found after following these buildings that had reflective surfaces on them, reflective coatings, they were saving somewheres in the range, on the low end, 15%, on the high end, 30%.

There's a lot of factors that come into this, how tall the building is, how many floors it has, how much windows and all that. But just on an average, if you're saving 15 to 20% in summertime energy cooling, it's a big deal. And it's peak energy. That's when the worst of our problems is, right at 3:00 in the afternoon when every hot building in the area has got their air conditioners going full bore. So that's that peak load that they were trying to tame and it did a real good job. So much so that they put it into state building regulations, building codes.

Go ahead, Hal.

Hal Leland: Yeah, so that was all driven by the California Energy Commission, and they did start working in early 2000s. And in 2005, Title 24 for the state of California adopted cool roofs. So it's Title 24 Part Six, and that is where the Cool Roof Rating Council was born. And Greg's right, all these membranes are white. PVC, TPO, even EPDM in the west makes a white sheet now. And we've, of course, coatings, and we've always been the coating guy out here in the west. And Title 24, it drove everything. Now everyone follows them to the Atlanta, Georgia, Miami Beach, Los Angeles. They all follow California Energy Commission Title 24 Part Six.

Greg Hlavaty: By the way, Hal is on the board of Directors of the Cool Roof Rating Council which you can speak about a little bit.

Karen Edwards: I was going to ask Hal, what makes a roof cool? What requirements does it have to meet in order to be classified as a cool roof?

Hal Leland: Well, the CRRC, the Cool Rating Council, I'll lead you, or I'll read you our little blurb on it and what we do. We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We develop fair, accurate, credible methods for evaluating and labeling the [inaudible 00:08:31] properties of roofing and exterior wall products. And we have a mission. Our mission is to bring the objective scientific information related to cool surfaces to critical discussions and informed decisions about the impacts of heat islands, extreme heat and energy use in the built environment.

So it's a very important little group. And all we do at the Cool Roof Rating Council is we measure reflectivity and emissivity. And we've been adopted into codes and standards. We're working on ASTM International, but we're already in ANSI, which is the American National Standards Institute. We have S100, which identifies the preparation of samples, how we treat them, how we test them at one year and at three years. So that gives us our qualification for Title 24 Part six, Los Angeles Green Building Code, LEED qualification system. So I'm involved with that because that's what we do. We're right in the heart of that as Western Colloid.

Karen Edwards: You mentioned that you test it at one year, you test it at three years. So just being white doesn't mean that it's going to meet the requirements of a cool roof. It has to be tested and proven.
Hal Leland: It does. And like I said, the CRRC, all we do is we test. So you're going to get a number regardless, a certain emissivity, a certain reflectivity at one year and a certain rating at three years. But it's the government agencies that call out what you need to qualify to get a cool roof. And California is, like Greg said, is the leader. They're always the leader and every state in the nation follows us. And so California requires a certain emissivity and a certain reflectivity to qualify for Title 24. So that's our goal whenever we make any coating is to exceed that.

Greg Hlavaty: Let me say something about the state of California. There's a lot of things, a lot of us in the manufacturing, building, roofing industry and all that gripes us about the state of California and all their codes and all their energy. But I'm going to point out one real simple basic fact. In the late '90s and the early 2000s, California was rolling ... we had brownouts and rolling blackouts all summer long. It was, "What area are you in? Are you getting the blackout?" You're getting the rolling blackout, you're getting the brownouts. We needed more energy to be built and we had to build more generation plants. And they said, "No, you're not going to build any more generation plants." Matter of fact, they took a few offline, some of the nuclear.

Since then, they've not built any generation plants. And yet all those problems, I'm not going to say they've gone away 100%, but they've gone away 90-plus percent. They've accomplished what it would have taken in building more energy plants by putting some of these energy codes in. So the proof is in the pudding. It has worked. It has kept us from having to build more generators.

Karen Edwards: That's really impressive just by making that change, by putting reflective roofing systems on buildings that it's had that impact.

Hal Leland: It's not just roofs, it's walls. And now I'm on a steering committee for pavements as well. Greg and I have been working with a new chemistry, it's not asphalt-based, for pavement. Reflective pavements. I think that's going to be even a bigger movement, quite frankly.

Karen Edwards: Wow.

Greg Hlavaty: And let me say this about the energy thing. The whole aspect of it means different things to different people. So it means, like Hal talked about, heat island. Well, heat island in effect is, how much does your city, the dome over your city heat up because it's becoming so hot? And if you have that island or the city itself, usually a metropolitan area, if that gets hot, everything around it gets hot if it's just two or three degrees more. And there's lots of evidence for this. You can look at a lot of aerial photographs or satellite photographs of how the countryside is one, two, three, five, six, eight degrees cooler than the city. So that's heat island. Then that reflects into everything else. The people on the street, people in their cars, houses, the industry and all that, so that's the heat island.

That's the big picture. That's the planet kind of picture looking at it. But then there's the local city and the governments that either have to bring in energy for their people and then they have to implement codes, so it means something to them. And then you get to more granular and then you talk about the building owner. What does it mean to them? It's energy directly and a dollar bill. The state, if they don't have to put in more generating facilities, and usually they put in generating facilities not to cover the electricity needs day in, day out, 365 days a year, it's the afternoons of the summer. The peak, what they call peak load. And that's what they have to gear for. And if they can drop that down, they don't have to even cool off all the way around. So that's a big thing to them.

The bottom line is, I have a map here that the Department of Energy put out some years ago. This is pretty old and it might be updated. But what they found in the testing, metropolitan scale savings per 1000 square feet of roof area of air-conditioned buildings ... So we're talking about warm weather climates in Los Angeles for every square feet, a thousand square feet roof, the building's air-conditioned, this is all averaged, you could have high and low, but it's $20 a month. $34 in Phoenix, $11 in Fort Worth, 18 in and Houston, $9 in Chicago, $17 in New Orleans, $17 in New York City.

Karen Edwards: Wow.

Greg Hlavaty: So, it doesn't have to be down here in the southwest and the heat area because the heating energy is not as demanding as the cooling energy is. And we've always had a lot of pushback from different manufacturers. Manufacturers that made black EPDM would push back, "Oh no, in the northern climates you don't want white roofs." But what it's really shown, anywheres up into the southern Canada, for the most part, having a cool roof is better than having a non-cool roof. Because any of those areas, you take Chicago, it's hot in the summer. In New York City-

Karen Edwards: I was just going to say that. It's hot in the summer. I'm in the Northeast. It's hot in the summer.
Greg Hlavaty: So, it's a benefit. And those are benefits to the building occupant, owner. Might be the owner or the occupant.

So it means different things to different people. But the reality is, is that this is an easy way to achieve some energy efficiency for yourself, for your neighbors and for the planet by just ... In most cases, you have to put a new roof on to get a cool roof. In our cases, our retrofit roofs, our maintenance systems accomplish that for them without the need to tear off and re-roof and what have you. So like I said, we just slid right into it. We've been doing this for 40 years, but it's become a very appropriate thing to do.

Go ahead.

Hal Leland: Want to just jump in because you're making all great points. But we've done a few projects in Philadelphia on the row homes. Everyone lives in the northeast knows what a row home is, right?

Karen Edwards: Right.

Hal Leland: We've gone up and we've coated one-half of a row. And we've watched the energy change and the savings in that top floor, and it's tremendous.

Karen Edwards: Wow. You guys were pioneers before it became cool to be cool.
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All right. Welcome back, everybody. We are talking about the energy efficiency of cool roofs and upgrading when it makes sense and why someone would do that.

I think our discussion so far, Greg, as you said, you've been cool since the beginning. And then throughout the years with the Cool Roof Rating Council, with testing, with regulations, it's become a requirement in some places, particularly California. And we've got some roofs out there that are darker, are asphalt, are dark material. And they're prime candidates for that makeover to become energy efficient. And you mentioned yourself about rebates that may be available. And I'm not an accountant, nor are you, so definitely talk to your tax accountant. But are there still options for folks who make that change to a reflective roof to get some benefit financially in addition to the cost savings of [inaudible 00:19:16].

Greg Hlavaty: There's not many of those around anymore because they've been ... because the cool has been put into code in most places. There's still a few areas. California started out with rebates and then they said ... then everybody complained, "Why don't we get the rebates anymore?" Well, because it works so well that they made it a law. We got you to do it by dangling the carrot. Now we're using the stick, but do it because it's important.

I was going to bring up one more point is that we talk about air conditioning and saving the energy that we're going to use to cool the building and all that. There's also a really important use of cool roofs for non-air conditioned buildings. And a lot of people don't realize we've had multiple. One of the first studies that the state did was a Home Depot facility in ... somewheres up on the central coast. I can't remember the city. Hollister or one of those. And that Home Depot got so hot during the summer that they had to close it early in the afternoon because it became uncomfortable above what they called a temperature that they could allow the public in.

So they put in some fans and ducting that helped a little bit, but they ended up putting on just a good acrylic reflective coating on that roof and it totally changed the profile of that building. They kept it open during all hours that they needed. We had a couple of facilities in Los Angeles that had a tannish, brown-colored cap sheet roof on them. And again, the same thing. One of them was a book binding company that in the summertime, they would close early on the hot summer days because it was just too hot to work in that warehouse. So they put a system on with our white coating and totally changed. That problem just went away there. They could work all the hours they needed.

There was a big spice company that I won't say the name of, but store spices in bulk that then get packaged and put on your shelves on your market. And most spices are not picked from the tree or the plant or whatever and you get them next week. You get them next year or two years or three years. They have a pretty good shelf life, but their shelf life was dropped by two or three or four years in the warehousing of the spice company until they put on cool roofs over. They were either going to have to air condition in the warehouses, which is very expensive, or they put the cool roofs on which totally changed the profile, the temperature profile of those buildings.

So there are a lot of reasons to put a cool roof on besides just saving the energy directly in the building. It's the comfort level of the employees that work inside those facilities.

Hal Leland: Or the dairy cattle, Greg.

Karen Edwards: Oh, right. Animals, they don't want to be hot either. [inaudible 00:22:34]

Greg Hlavaty: The Sheriff's Department stables, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department have metal roofs, and the metal roofs had a light colored, light tan roof on it. But the sheriff's stables with all the sheriff's horses, which is a pretty good amount of horses they have that they use for either use or also parades and different things. Anyway, we put one of our metal systems on there and made a big impact on the comfort level for the animals.

Karen Edwards: Well, it's hard to argue. I love that you're sharing the real life scenarios where this has been done and this has made a huge difference. It almost is a no-brainer, why would you not do this?

Greg Hlavaty: Right.

Karen Edwards: Wow. Wow. This is fantastic.

So are there things that a building owner should know? Like I said, it seems like a no-brainer to me, but we've talked about this in other episodes. Not every roof is a good candidate for this and there's factors that they need to consider. But you guys, you have the expertise to help. So you're happy to talk to someone if they're unsure, if an owner or even a contractor is not sure if they're a good candidate. What's that look like for them in helping them determine that?

Greg Hlavaty: Well, first of all, we have people anywhere we sell our products. We're happy to view the building, give them some ideas. One of the big differences with us, and there are many really good fellow coating manufacturers out there that will sell reflective coating to you. The thing is, if you're going to spend the money on that reflective coating to save energy or save the membrane of the roof or whatever your reason is, the most of what you're going to be spending, any system, is going to be that reflective part of the top. Because that's more expensive whether it's acrylic or silicone or urethane, any of the different technologies.

So if you're already going to be putting that money out, with Western Colloid, what we're a little different is, is that you can put a membrane on with it. A relatively inexpensive membrane, a reinforced asphalt emulsion with an acrylic surfacing to give them waterproofing, tensile strength, the full membrane strength that they need for a roof and get the white reflective coating on it. Because you're already going to be paying for 50 or two-thirds of that if you just put the acrylic on. So why not upgrade that roof?

Now, if it's a brand new roof, that's something different. But usually if it's a brand new roof, they're already under the energy code. So think about before you just spend money on painting something white, think about getting some bang for your buck and getting a membrane with it that does some good for your building. But most buildings, if they're aged, they're going to need something.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, Hal.

Hal Leland: So, you said not every roof would be a good candidate. I think every roof is a great candidate for a reflective roof system, whether it's a single-ply or a coating system. And like Greg said, a coating only is not always the best option for you. So multiple layers of reinforcement, all acrylic, polyester-reinforced systems, asphalt emulsion, polyester and acrylic, and modified versions of either of those.

So every roof is going to benefit from getting the sun off of it and stop, what Greg was talking about earlier, is that thermal cycling. The movement of a roof a day to the night, to the morning, to the afternoon. That's the moving, shrinking, and moving and shrinking and moving, that's what tears the roof apart. That's what delineate the seams. It can work on a metal roof. And a ton of movement in a metal roof. So stopping the thermal cycling by making your roof reflective and emissive is ... that's going to benefit every roof deck, whether it's cap sheet or existing coated roof or single-ply or whatever.

Greg Hlavaty: You're building a new building and you've got a new construction, then they'll give you an option for a good single-ply membrane. PVC, TPO. But in most cases, we're talking to building owners that are existing, or a roofing contractor that is talking with building owners that they've got already existing issues and problems.

And it's the flip side of that too. I got a roof, I don't necessarily need to put a cool roof on right now, but I got leaks and I got problems. Well, again, if you're going to do that, if you're going to put one of our maintenance systems, one of our reinforced systems on, you're going to almost automatically, but hopefully by choice, is you'll get the energy efficiency as part of the package. That's just another selling point that if you're a roofing contractor that's listening to this.

And by the way, we had a little roofing expo at our plant in Texas yesterday.

Karen Edwards: Oh, nice.

Greg Hlavaty: And there was 22 contractors. Several of them mentioned that they listen to our podcast regularly. So that's nice to know that they're out there listening to this.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. That's great feedback. We're glad that you're listening and we hope that you're learning and that we're helping.

I know I sure have learned a lot talking to you two over all these episodes. I just want to say thank you for being here. We love talking about all the issues related to roof restoration. Energy efficiency was a great topic today. It just makes sense. And Western Colloid has a solution that probably will meet your needs. So please reach out and talk to them.

And remember, if you have questions, we want to answer those. So you can send us your questions at westerncolloid.com or askaroofer.com. If we use your question in a future episode, we will send you a gift. And we love talking about restoring roofs. So next month, please tune in because we're going to be talking about the argument for good roof maintenance, and what is roof maintenance? What does that entail? What does it mean and why should you be doing it?

So remember, you can listen to us on your favorite podcast platform. We are all over the place. You can find us on westerncolloid.com, askaroofer.com. So please subscribe and set your notifications so that you don't miss an episode. We'll see you next time.