Traditionally, when you were choosing your roofing shingles or tiles, you were having to decide on a color to which you could commit as well. After all, you surely can’t paint roof shingles, can you? The thought seems ridiculous, messy and destined to end poorly. However, you can indeed paint shingles and tiles – if you have the right kind of paint.
Today, we’re going to take a look at the appropriate steps to take if you want to keep up to date on popular colors, without a devastatingly expensive re-roofing job to achieve it. Every point we outline here is equally important, so heed all of this, you’ll thank us for it later.
Roof Inspection
Yes, that’s right. Before you paint your roof, you should have it inspected. In all honesty, a yearly inspection is a good idea anyhow. Inspections can reveal problems that haven’t shown symptoms yet, and a lot of times, these issues can be nipped in the bud promptly, before real unfortunate things happen.
Your roof needs to be in basically new condition either by actually being new, or having bene repaired and maintained to keep that quality. Painting a bad or degraded roof is just as silly as painting over crumbling plaster, for more or less the same reasons.
Roofing Paints
Like we said, the notion of painting your roof sounds messy and disastrous. That’s because we instinctively imagine interior paints or spray coats of some sort, neither of which work for your roof. The materials involved in roofs aren’t themselves particularly compatible with those paints, for starters.
For another, roof temperatures can exceed 150 degrees on a hot summer day, and interior paints can’t deal with that, they’ll melt or even possibly ignite. They also can’t hold up against the rain, snow and cold very well.
Finally, they hinder the UV deflection modern materials are meant to handle, causing those already high temperatures to exponentially increase.
Roofing paint is very expensive, but your roof is no place to cut corners. Cheaper coatings, even if they claim to be diverse in application, could cause more expensive problems, than the cost of the roofing paint.
Of course, the scope of your roof will govern how many cans of it you need. Be sure you have roofing paint.
White Roofing?
Researching this, you probably see a lot of mentions of “white roofing”, which has become popular in recent times. White is a deflective color, not absorbing much light whatsoever. This allows it to deflect more heat and more UV energy coming from the sun, which reduces energy costs significantly.
At least, that’s the idea. The problem is that white coatings have been used on buildings for centuries, and it remains inconclusive if it’s enough of a shield to keep the volume inside from getting hot anyhow.
Three problems a white roof will bring about are one, it kind of looks wrong, which might mess with your curb appeal. Two, white shows every speck of dirt, meaning your roof will look dirty and gross. Third, on a sunny day, a neighborhood with a lot of white roofs will produce blinding glare.
Contractors
Don’t do this yourself, unless you’re experienced in roofing. You should have a skilled, experienced contractor paint your roof, and they should also help you choose your paint. Make use of their knowledge and experience.
Do your research online before committing to any one contractor. Of course, be sure you get several estimates and quotes from different sources, as well.
To learn more, fill out our contact form today. We believe customers should always be informed, always.
