Improving Property Insulation: Are Asphalt Shingles Enough For It?

Calgary AB homeowners looking to improve their residents' overall insulation should look towards their roofs for improvements. Insulation upgrades affect your walls, windows, and doors most of the time. However, your roof, always hit by the sun, has a great contribution to upgrading your residential insulation.

Insulation requires three distinct characteristics to deliver exceptional results for homeowners. Proper installation by certified Calgary AB roofers is a necessity. Here are three others to keep in mind.

Density

Asphalt shingles are a nominally-dense roofing material, making them a viable material capable of contributing massively to your insulation efforts. Additionally, asphalt shingles reflect sunlight thanks to their light color and do not absorb it.

Protection Against Moisture

Shingle roofing's moisture barrier prevents it from absorbing any moisture. The presence of moisture over insulation materials will reduce their insulation performance. Without tiny air pockets to slow down temperature molecules, it cannot do its job properly.

Seam Consistency

Installation by reputable roofers ensures your asphalt shingle roofs create an airtight seal that does not have misalignments. These are common issues, even with non-roof insulation materials.

To enhance your roof's insulation capabilities, Radiant Barrier has an interesting post that may shed light on the topic. Read more about it below.

Black asphalt roof shingles absorb over 90% of the radiant heat that strikes them, making them easily over 170 degrees on a hot summer day. A radiant barrier continues to be an excellent solution to block that heat before it enters your living space, but many DIY homeowners and even some professional installers question whether the radiant barrier reflecting the heat back up can actually make the roof shingle much hotter.

Radiant barrier applied either under the roof rafters or under the roof sheathing is probably the most common application of a radiant barrier, but many homeowners shy away from it because they don’t fully understand what radiant barrier is or how it works. There is a misconception that if the heat is coming in through the roof shingles and strikes a radiant barrier only to reflect back out of the roof shingles, then it will be twice as hot. But, that is just not the nature or heat transfer.

Unlike insulation like fiberglass or foam, neither radiant barriers nor the roofing materials hold radiant heat. The radiant barrier reflects 95% of the radiant heat back to the roofing materials, which then emits over 90% of the heat out the roof almost instantly. Florida Solar Energy Center conducted a study on radiant barrier and shingle temperatures and found that the roof increased in temperature by only about 5 degrees at the hottest point of the day, when the heat was entering and exiting the roof simultaneously. This is not significant enough to cause any damage to shingles.

Roofs with radiant barrier have the potential to lower the temp at night because the radiant barrier prevented the heat loss that would typically occur from the traditional mass insulation on the attic floor rising to heat the roof.  This means radiant barrier can increase the life of the roof shingles. Traditional mass insulation is often to blame for your air conditioning kicking on in the middle of the night, because once the fiberglass, cellulose or foam has absorbed heat, it continues to emit the heat in all directions, including up to your roof. (Continued)

If you need a certified roofer to install your Certainteed roofing materials, you can count on us at No Payne Roofing. We're a Certainteed-certified roofing company that can help you with everything you need. Contact us today to learn more!

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No Payne Roofing Inc.
44 Hawkcliff Pl NW,
Calgary, AB T3G 2S2, Canada
587-227-0517
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