| Why Cool Roofs?
By reducing typical roof surface temperatures by 50ºF or more, cool roofs provide a number of potential immediate and long-term benefits to building owners and society generally. Cool roofs represent a rapidly growing segment of the roofing industry and present code bodies and building officials with an excellent opportunity to:
- Reduce energy consumption Help address the local community's heat island effects, and Enhance roof surface longevity, which also results in reduced demolition waste
- Help assure occupant comfort
How Can the Cool Roof Rating Council Help?
The Cool Roof Rating Council (CRRC) is a non-profit association comprised of roofing product manufacturers and sellers, trade associations, utilities, national laboratories, regulatory agencies, and other stakeholders. The Council was established in 1998 to implement and promote fair, accurate, and credible radiative performance rating systems for roof surfaces. The centerpiece of the CRRC is its Product Rating Program, a third-party testing and rating program that provides credible reflectance and emissivity data.
CRRC standardizes and assures the quality of the rating process-we don't establish or enforce performance thresholds. As has already happened in California, a growing number of jurisdictions and programs are expected to cite the CRRC rating system as a means of verifying roof product radiative performance. Code bodies leveraging the CRRC Product Rating Program enjoy the following benefits:
- There are no costs to code bodies - information is readily available on the CRRC web site; Consistency is assured - checks and balances are built into the CRRC program; Product verification is available by web and phone for rated products; and
- CRRC membership is not mandated (though it is encouraged).
Cool roofs in many locations can enhance communities' building stock and the environment for little or no incremental cost. The CRRC Product Rating Program provides the real-time tools appropriate to code bodies and building officials for capitalizing on this cost-effective compliance measure.
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