Summer ice cap still a bonus during winter

Towards the end of the hottest summer in 80 years, we told you the story of our really cool ice cap that saved us from frying in our flat roofed office. You remember this white paint we had applied to our office roof, which uses ceramic beads to reflect radiant heat from the summer sun right back into the atmosphere.

This is the space age heat barrier which protects astronauts from being cooked alive when they return to earth in their space shuttles when they pass through temperatures of around 2900°C. The Ceratech technology is reputed to reduce the heat of buildings by up to 45%. There is nothing more satisfying than using an environmentally friendly air-conditioner.

We looked around to find more home owners who have tried this eco- friendly approach to cooling their buildings.

Sheryl Ozinsky works in the Energy department of the City of Cape Town and stuggled with immense summer heat in her apartment block in Higgovale, a particularly wind-free and very hot area. There are 4 apartments in this block. This summer they had the heat barrier applied to all their roofs. I called her up to find out how it worked for them. She raved about how much cooler it was beneath her flat roof.

“There’s at least a 5 - 6 degrees difference,” she assured me. “It works like a bomb!”

There was some concern about the effect on the neighbours. One lady had expressed concern about the glare of the newly painted white roof. Luckily there is a solution to this challenge. This paint’s excessive glare fades within the first 6 months, so by next summer it should be a whole lot easier on the eye.

Sheryl was wondering about the effect of her new ice cap on the temperature inside the building during the coming winter months.

“I hope we’re not going to be colder now,” she said.

Suddenly also scared of freezing our toes off this winter, I asked Geoff Grose, sales director from Ceratech, who explained the effects during the wintertime like this:

“Ceratech thermal insulation bounces all radiant heat back to where it came from. So during the winter, it could in fact help keep the home’s inside heat inside. However, it doesn’t bounce back convection heat, which is what most indoor heat is made of. So on the whole the effect during the winter is either positive or neutral, but definitely not colder.”

Should you like to have your roof coated, Ceratech delivers to your home. This is an excellent example of an intelligent adaptation to our more extreme weather conditions. This is passive insulation for your home, saving you energy, saving your pocket, saving the earth.