Transcript:
Hey guys, Gerald Hall here with Rhino Shield, and I’m joined today by my good friend Mike Moore. We’re gonna talk today about energy efficiency and Rhino Shield, and how it can add some energy efficiency to your home.
Our Rhino Shield dealers talk to tens of thousands of homeowners every year, and there are a lot of commonly asked questions about Rhino Shield and how it can impact the energy efficiency of your home. We’re gonna talk about those in this short video today.
When we talk about energy efficiency, what are the major components of an energy-efficient home?
Sure. Energy efficiency is very important to all builders and homeowners now, and almost everything in the home can contribute to that. It could be the attic insulation, the SEER value of your HVAC, the insulation of your windows—but paint or good coatings can have an effect on that.
The largest surface area of your home is your walls. So when you talk about the insulation of roofs and walls, that could be external insulation in the form of a coating, right?
Absolutely.
So Mike, when we talk about coatings having insulating properties, how do you achieve that with coatings?
Sure. A lot of people don’t expect their paint to add any insulation—but a good coating can do that. Typically, there are two ways:
One is reflectivity—that’s the type of pigments that you put in it. Some colorants you can manufacture are more reflective than others. When the sun’s beating down on your house, it’s blocking or reflecting those rays away from it. Especially if you can reflect the infrared rays, because that’s generally what provides most of the heat gain.
The other way is through your solids package. Some materials conduct thermal energy, and others conduct it less. We try to use things like ceramics that conduct heat less than what you would find in a typical paint.
Rhino Shield has an R-value equivalent—or insulating value equivalent—of 6.89. That comes from a couple of key things: solar reflectivity (how much of those solar rays we bounce off) and the ingredients in the coating. The ceramic microspheres manufactured by 3M and the amount of solids in the product have a lower thermal conductivity than clay mineral fillers found in typical paint.
So Mike, we have another way to quantify the insulating properties of Rhino Shield, and that’s an R-value equivalent test. Tell me about that.
Well, most people, if you ask them about insulation, will refer to an R-value. You see that with wall insulation—the pink rolls at the big box store. That doesn’t always correlate to paint, so you do an R-value equivalent test.
We had a materials engineer compare Rhino Shield versus various levels of wall insulation using infrared heat, and he calculated that the Rhino Shield system would add insulation equivalent to about 6.89 R-value, which is almost two inches of Owens Corning fiberglass wall insulation.
How do you measure solar reflectivity?
There’s a test for solar reflectivity, and then there’s a bigger calculation called the Solar Reflective Index. That’s getting popular in the building industry. You can use it for roof shingles or for paint—basically, how reflective is that building material?
In general, zero would be tar, 100 would be bright white paint. In our case, we test at 107—almost off the chart, more reflective than typical white paint. Again, that’s because of the ingredients we put in: high-quality zinc oxide, ceramics, and other premium materials.
Mike, we talked about solar reflectivity, R-value, and a lot of big words and scientific terms. Let’s talk about a practical application of a coating with insulating properties on the outside of your home. You guys conducted a thermal study recently, right?
Yes. We built a wall with cement board siding (a popular building product). Half the wall was painted with typical gray exterior latex paint; the other half was painted with Rhino Shield—exact same color. We put it in the Florida sun and measured the temperature.
The Rhino Shield wall stayed cooler on the front, but more importantly, we measured the backside. It’s one thing to keep the face cooler—it’s more important to stop that heat from transferring through the cement into the house.
We saw almost a 30-degree difference on the backside, showing that Rhino Shield doesn’t just reflect heat, it stops heat transfer into the home.
When we talk about insulating values of walls, Rhino Shield also has a product called Super Shield—an insulating coating for roofs—and that was included in the imaging survey you did, correct?
Exactly. We took a roof—half of it was left as-is, the other half coated with Super Shield ceramic coating—and measured the temperature in the middle of the day in the Florida sun. We saw a 25-degree temperature difference.
That makes a big difference on a roof. I tell people all the time—whether it’s 25 degrees cooler on the roof or 30 degrees cooler on the exterior wall—I can’t tell you exactly how much you’ll save on your energy bill because every home is different. But intuitively, if your roof and walls are cooler, your HVAC system will work less than it normally would.
Hey Mike, thanks for joining me today to talk about Rhino Shield and energy efficiency. Hope you guys learned something today. We appreciate you taking time out here with us. Take care.