As a homeowner, you have a lot of bills to pay. It’s essential that you make every aspect of your home count – and that includes your roof. It can be kind of fun to find ways to save money and cut utility bills. The roofing on your KS home can help with that. It offers a lot of potential for conserving energy and helping you keep utility bills to a manageable level.
Tips to Improve Your Roof’s Energy Efficiency
Here are three ways to get more out of your roof. These energy-efficiency tips will help you save on utility costs while making your home a more comfortable place to live. A local residential roofer can help you implement these tips. Read on to learn more.
#1. Add Insulation
The best time to put insulation in is during the re-roofing process. But you can also get some of the same benefits by adding insulation to your attic after the fact. A new layer of insulation is the number one thing that translates into energy savings for your home. Insulation creates a barrier that reduces the amount of thermal transfer between the attic and the temperature-controlled air inside the home below. The insulation helps keep the conditioned air below where it belongs rather than allowing it to escape into the attic and out through the roof. Additional insulation can be added at any time, and this is a good place to start if you’re looking to lower your utility bills.
#2. Choose “Cool” Roofing Materials
Dark shingles absorb more heat than light-colored shingles do, just as a black t-shirt absorbs more heat than a white one. If you’re due for a roof replacement, consider replacing current roofing materials with lighter-colored shingles. Many modern roofing materials are designed to reflect the sun’s UV rays rather than absorb them. This helps keep your house cooler during hot weather. Many residential roofers have access to the latest roofing materials, such as those with coatings on them that reflect UV rays. These high-tech materials not only keep the house cooler but also prolong the life of your roof by deflecting heat off the shingles. Highly reflective shingles last longer, too, because they stay cooler, which means their asphalt base does not age as quickly.
#3. Improve Ventilation
It may seem like allowing fresh air to circulate through the attic is counterproductive to keeping the house cool, but fresh air plays a vital role in roof health. The attic gets very hot during the summer months in many climates. Without some sort of ventilation, excessive heat in the attic can warp the roofing on your KS home. The insulation you just added in #1 above may not be enough to keep up with the heat accumulation. Adding intake vents to the roof will draw more fresh air into the attic, which essentially helps the attic “breathe.” This is a natural process that helps eliminate excessive temperatures in the attic, keeping the roof cooler, lowering cooling costs in the home below, and extending the life of your roof.
Shamrock Roofing Can Help Lower Your Utility Costs
Shamrock Roofing and Construction can help you determine the most viable ways to lower your energy costs. We specialize in everything from roof leak repairs on your Kansas City home to full roof replacements. We’ll come out and perform a residential roofing inspection on your home to see what steps we can take to increase the energy efficiency of your Kansas City home. Give us a call or contact us online to learn more about our residential roofing services.