Colour of the loft tiles
One of the things that I had to choose was the colour of the outside tiles for the front of the loft – as per design it had to match existing. So we could go with what our neighbours had installed which mostly was either grey slate tiles or brown clay tiles. As a saying goes: “You don’t argue about the taste“ but my builder suggested red clay tiles that looked similar to existing brick and are usually associated with roof colour in Mediterranean. That prompted me to thing about reflective value of Red vs Grey tiles. And as it turns out the red tiles indeed are associated with better reflective values than grey or brown. The best would be white but that’s unrealistic, so I did go for the red even though ecstatically I would have preferred brown. But when it comes to energy bills and not having your loft overheat the choice was clear to me.
I did try and source pale terra cotta tile but ended up with red terra cotta which is not by much but a little better then standard alternatives. You can have a read about different values and temperature differences here:
https://heatisland.lbl.gov/resources/roofing-tile
Another way to think about it is the table below that shows how much of sunlight each colour shade will reflect back. That prompted me to think about another item that will be half the size of my new GRP roof:
One thing is clear to me that felt will be getting much hotter in summer as it’s pure black whereas with GRP you can actually get different shades of grey and some places have it in white but that needs to be pre ordered. I’ve asked my builder to paint the last coat in white so it has better reflective properties and hopefully keeps my loft a bit cooler in hot days. As all of the previous heat records were being broken this summer in UK this couldn’t have been more important to me 🙂