How can Red Sky Shelters offer darker roof colors that don absorb a lot of heat?
The secret is in the pigments we use. To understand how they work we must first understand how light and solar energy operates: Light comes in many colors. The difference in these colors relates to the frequency of light’s wavelength. The reason we perceive different colors is that each object absorbs all visible light except the light of that color. The light that’s being reflected is the color we see. White things reflect most all of visible light while black things absorb most all visible light. As you probably know, black things (like your driveway or black upholstery) absorb a lot of heat too, while white things stay cool. In fact, some dark colored roofing can attain a temperature of 190 degrees F or more. However, what we see as visible light represents only a small portion of the energy that comes from the sun. It turns out that most of the heat is not in the visible light. Black things get hotter because they are also absorbing infrared radiation. Infrared (meaning “less than
