T&T: Air conditioning upgrade

[LRZeitlin at aol.com]

Those of you contemplating upgrading your boat's air conditioning, consider 
this:

Last week I attended a seminar, sponsored by the local utility company, about 
home heating and cooling. One of the speakers mentioned that the roof color 
of a house could make a 30 to 40% difference in the air conditioning load. The 
more reflective the roof. the less solar heat absorbed.

General Electric lightmeter in hand, I rushed down to my Willard. The roof of 
the pilot house and saloon is painted in a slip resistant light gray. So are 
the walk surfaces on the side decks. This gray paint reflects only about 25% 
of the ambient sunlight. The adjacent white gel coat surfaces reflect over 75% 
of the ambient sunlight.   Light that is absorbed rather than reflected gets 
converted into heat.

On that day the outside temperature was about 80 degrees but the below decks 
temperature was 98 degrees. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight I realize that 
I could have made my boat much more comfortable in the summer by painting the 
decks white. If I used aluminum paint, or put on a layer of aluminum foil on 
the horizontal surfaces, it would have been even cooler.

When I was a boy in the midwest, before the days of auto air conditioning, we 
made fun of a neighbor who painted the roof of his black sedan with whitewash 
every summer. He claimed it made the car much cooler. By the end of the 
summer, the rain had washed the whitewash off and the car looked normal the rest of 
the year.

Larry Z


**************************************
 Get a sneak peek of the all-new 
AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour