We drive hybrid cars; ride our bicycles to work and car pool when we can. We recycle our milk cartons, tin cans and glass bottles and we use cloth shopping bags instead of paper or plastic. But lets face it our carbon footprint is still casting a large shadow over our long term availability of resources and we need to keep finding ways to be eco friendly. Some of the ways that we can make a big impact on our resources are ways many of us may not have even considered when we think green. Cool roofing for example can make a continuous impact on our carbon footprint and create long term benefits for the consumer with only one step towards change.

Simply put a cool top of your house reflects back the suns heat instead of absorbing the sun’s hot rays into the building. If you have ever been in a building with no air conditioning on a summer day you know that not only will be building be hot all day long but the absorbed heat from the top of your house will make it even hotter at night as it dissipates into the building.

Cool roofs have been proven to reduce your utility bills by an average savings of 7-15% in just cooling cost alone. A cool roof will decrease the need to run a building’s central air conditioning as much and will increase the user comfort level in the building even if there is no air conditioning unit.

If you want to know what you will save you can calculate your savings on a cool roof by checking out the Department of Energy or the EPA’s web sites that have calculators to show your real savings on a cool roof with your number input.

Another benefit to keeping the top of your house cool is the fact that it will help mitigate urban heat Island effect that has impacted larger metro areas. This phenomenon was discovered when scientist realized that the urban cities were hotter than the outlaying rural areas due to urbanization. If every building had a cool house top the impact from urbanization would be greatly reduced or even eradicated. And if you live in a tropical or sub tropical climate the need for bulk attic insulation can be eliminated with the use of a cool roof. For other climatic areas the amount of bulk attic insulation can be greatly reduced with a cool roof.

What type of roof materials are right for your roof will depend on whether or not your roof is a steep or low slop roof. A roofing contractor can access whatever kind of slope you have and let you know which roofing materials are right for you based on the slope, your geographic location and your budget amongst other factors.

So if you want to go green, impact the planet and save money there really is no downside to converting to a cool roof design.