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Science

Mood Home 81

Posted by michael from the color-by-numbers dept.
CMiYC writes: "The New Scientist has a short story on a new kind of paint. In the winter it'll make your house darker to heat it up and in the summer it'll might your house's color light to help cool it down. For the best effect your house would have to go from black to white, but I don't know many people that would like their house to be black... Kind of gloomy."
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  • you could plant some trees around your house. It will keep it cool on the summer and warm in the winter. I don't know if it would work on regions where trees lose all their leaves on the winter, tough, but here it works pretty well.

  • maybe (Score:2)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    what if they only did the roofs like this. that's where most of the sunlight's hitting anyway.

    That reminds me, don't they have that in Sweden? (where they have *everything*, including many, many sets of sexy, blonde, big busted, blue-eyed, twins, triplets, and quadruplets)
    Yeah, it was like some deal where the roof was arranged in a staircase-like shape, and the tops were white to reflect high-angle summer sun, and the sides were black to absorb low-angle winter sun. . .
  • You can find the year from the URI.
    #define X(x,y) x##y

  • Re:Useless for houses. (Score:3)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Saturday April 21, 2001 @08:56AM (#276015) Homepage Journal
    Jefft, clearly you live in a moderate climate.

    Having lived in a cold climate I can assure you that a dark house in a cold winter is every bit as helpful as a light one in a hot summer is.

    Furthermore while a blacktop road can be stifling in summer it can also shed itself of snow & ice faster in the winter. I spent 2.5 years living in a small farmtown north of Montreal by the foot of the Laurentian Mountains: One quickly learned which parts of which roads would be clean & dry after some solar heating and which ones would remain treacherous. New & dark roads cleared quickly, older & bleached would take much longer.

    Finally the paint-the-roof-white studies focussed on cities in the US West. These are primarily flat roofs covered in black asphalt & yes it was determined using some sort of cheap white-wash on top would significantly reduce both heat transmitted to the structure & heat contributed to the local environment.

    On the other hand places with colder climates tend to get more precipitation and have fewer flat-roofs, particularly places with heavy snow buildup. There roof-color is less significent as other effects like angles & extensive attics come into play. It's not a matter of a dark roof being intrinsically less effective, it's just there are more variables to affect their performance.

  • This is not a technology that will ever see the outside of more than a handful of houses.

    - Many people (I'm not one) care about the actual color of their houses. They can spend hour poring over books of paint chips. Having a house constantly change between a couple probably ugly colors will be completely unacceptable. What color do you paint the trim?

    - While having a house that's not dark in the summer will help quite a bit with cooling, the actual heat absorbed by a dark color in the winter would be minimal.

    I don't have any references, but I recall reading about getting city buildings to paint their roofs white instead of black to reduce the urban heat island effect. It was stated that it wouldn't make much difference in the winter for keeping things warm.

    Also, consider how hot black asphalt gets on a sunny summer day. Now consider how hot it gets on a sunny winter day when the temperature is 0.

    It's conceivable that this paint could find applications, but I don't it's going to be anything like energy efficient houses.

  • Mood toilet seats (Score:4)

    by slickwillie ( 34689 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @02:08PM (#276017)
    Wouldn't it be cool to paint this stuff on the toilet seats at work? Then you could tell how long it's been since it has been in use. I hate sitting on a warm seat.

  • Seasonal depression (Score:3)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @04:05PM (#276018)
    No thanks, for those of us who have seasonal depression, the winter time is already a dark enough period of time. I'd rather freeze and be happy than be depressed for 6 months of the year. (South Dakota)

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • It had solar panels, double-paned windows with a hollow wall between them and the outside,

    A wall between the window and the outside? That kind of defeats the object of the window, doesn't it? Unless the wall is transparent... in which case the window is redundant.

  • Doesn't California have a tax incentive? Something like 50% deductible?

    And it's not cost effective if you expect power prices to remain where they are. Market fluxuations will be in your favor!

    And if your goal is an energy efficient house, you can buy a modular house for the SAME cost as a regular house. Only difference is that your power bills are 1/10 to 1/4 of what they used to be.

    Power companies HAVE to accept the power you add to the grid and reimburse you. However, unless you've got a megawatt reactor in the basement, you're not going to get much.

    Once the government stopped subsidising renewable energy in the 80's, the field has settled down and has made some impressive strides. Windmill generators have become more efficient, solar cells have also become more effective, you can buy a micro geothermal plant!
  • For places with real snow winter, you're probably right, but bear in mind most of the world lives in warmer climates.

    If winter means +10C and summer +30C, I think this would work just fine.
  • ... Yeah man, just imagine a whole beowulf cluster of these things!

    (Anyone else noticing that all the Beowulf cluster jokes are getting replaced 'dropping acid' jokes. What, did everyone suddenly loose their jobs and start taking acid?)

    You know, I like to drop cloth and paint colors on my house.

  • There are a couple of companies who make Photovoltaic roof shingles. Unisolar was the first to produce these shingles, afaik:

    http://www.ovonic.com/unitedsolar/roof.html
  • I hope the colors aren't fixed to certain temperatures (80deg -- red, 100 deg -- blue). If the stuff catches on, it will be like a psychadelic housing tract. However, if it got popular enough cities would look a lot like a weather maps from the air :).
  • Very true. In fact, black (i.e. Flat Black) is not the most efficient absorber of solar energy (contrary to popular belief).

    Back in the mid to late 70's when solar energy was at the forefront, I conducted experiments using various color solar panels (regional science fair competiton). My results were in line with the published material of the day...the most efficient color was flat leaf green.

    When coupled with a laminar flow (rather than copper tubes) and non-UV absorbing glass, those collectors really worked well.

    The following year I build a model solar home equipped with thermostats, a thermal storage tank (filled with eucletic salts) and automated skylights (not bad for a 9th grade experiment).

    While I didn't win the competition that year in my category, I did discovery that the design of my solar home was highly earthquake resistant and it slid of the bus seat and wedged itself between seats after the competition. Also discovered that the space between school bus seats is actually very small as it took over an hour to extract my model home. Thought about that for the next year's experiments, but instead settled on a optical digital data transmission.
  • Mine still works fine.. Ohh, I bet you didn't read the label and put your in the dryer after washing it.

  • Re:Chameleon House (Score:4)

    by Knobby ( 71829 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @02:09PM (#276027)

    I heard a couple years ago that NREL (National Renewable Energy Lab) was working on amourphous silca (photovoltaic) shingles that were tied together electrically by nailing through a copper band on the underside of the shingle. The idea was that you'd just reshingle every house in America with these things.. I don't know exactly what happened with that project..

  • "There is a mood inside my house, and it's not mine!"

    -----

  • A wall saver ^_^!

    -----

  • Too bad the website didn't have a special kind of serlet runner, that could stay up in periods of low load and magically create new highly available servers during periods of high load.
  • Just think, your mouth will be watering so damn bad by the time you place your order, with that hunger-inducing paint, that you're gonna order the super-duper size fries with your combo and the irritating paint in the seating area will have you outa there in no time flat.
    Plus, in public washrooms they can put nice relaxing colors on the wall so you can have a peaceful BM.... perhaps with the fresh scent of pine to boot!
  • Not very ontopic here I guess, but I couldn't resist. It's nice to have paint with special properties. I am still looking for a car-coating paint which absorbs infra red light. Y'know, when they try to catch cars speeding, they use a Linar gun. Linar guns use infra red light techniques for measurements, I'd like to have a coating which cloakes the car from measurement, couldn't find this on the internet though.
  • Rather than paint the whole house so that it was black in winter, someone who understands thermal management of buildings and is good at graphic design could make this look sharp. Architects do things similar to this all the time. The good ones can make beautiful exteriors even when they are forced to use cheap materials. I'm sure there are houses where it would be hard to make this look good, but in many cases it would just be a matter of choosing the right colors for trim and shutters, and using enough brick or stucco to break up the solid black.
  • Maybe they could set something up to try to pull a downed page from Google's cache?

    Failing that, if you paste the URL into the search bar at Google and it can't find the page, it may give you a link to their cache.


    kickin' science like no one else can,
    my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
  • Sounds a lot like the paint used in Matchbox' Hotwheels doesn't it?
    I wish my car was painted like that.
  • Black doesn't just absorb heat better - it also emits it better. (That is why heat sinks are black.) Darker colours come into equilibrium with their environment faster. If your house is warmer than the environment, this could be bad. (On a sunny day, on the sunny side of the house, a fraction of a square degree (angle) of the environment is at a few thousand degrees, so this is likely to be a positive effect, but on the shady side it is likely to be negative.)

    Also, if your house is well insulated, it will do just as well at keeping that sun-induced heat from your dark exterior out as it does at keeping your central heating heat in.

  • Community watch? (Score:3)

    by MajroMax ( 112652 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @01:36PM (#276037)
    Okay, now what would the building committe think about this? They get upset enough when I try to paint my house _one_ color!
  • "I see a red house and I want to paint it blaaack..."

    A black house would rule... =))

    --

    "I'm surfin the dead zone
  • What's important is if it's light or dark, correct? So choose what color you want, and then it will go from (say) midnight blue to sky blue.

    The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
  • Sorry, that's a pretty misleading description. =) It's basically two layers of wall, each one with a window in the same place - super insulation, but still lets in light.

  • engineers are goths at heart (Score:4)

    by yamgirl ( 120751 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @01:47PM (#276041)
    >Kind of gloomy.

    This reminds me of an engineer acquiantance of mine. He designed the most energy efficient house in Canada. It had solar panels, double-paned windows with a hollow wall between them and the outside, an ultra-efficient heating system, the works. It WAS the most energy efficient house, anyhow.. After a year, the tenants got so depressed looking at the energy efficient black paint that they painted it a nice light blue.

    I think I can still hear the engineer gnashing his teeth about it..

  • Comment removed (Score:5)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @01:39PM (#276042)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Solar paneling a house is not cost effective. Even in California. It would take about $17,000 for the equipment. Figure a $100 monthly electric bill and it would take you 14 years to pay for its slef.

    Also a lot of power companies have a monopaly that says that even if you produce your own power you have to sell it to them and they will apply it as a credit on your bill.

    But my next laptop is going to be solar powerd, and I am gearing up to build a prototype as a solar powerd GameBoy to get it right the first time.
  • Living in San Diego in a one bedroom with one other person. 3 lights on at any given time, one TV (the old kind with knobs), two computers (this one is a p100 juice hog).

    Total= $80 - rate cap adjustment of $30 = $50 monthly bill.
    And knowing that one day they will come looking for that $30 it gets stuck in a savings acount so that i dont get screwd because of their new_math(tm)
  • Perhaps a better idea would be to have the paint absorb and store the sunlight during the summer months and then release it slowly during the winter. (Not necessarily a glow-in-the-dark room, but a room that gives off the UV and non-visible light from the sun.)

    This idea may help people who suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) which affects so many people in the northern part of the globe during the long, dark winter months.

    -DCookie

  • In Japan from medival times they've had houses which are made both black and white for this very purpose. The upper half is white, the lower half black with white "X"s through it. The "X"s are rounded pieces of wood that stick out a few centemeters for more surface area.

    I think the buildings look pretty nice, myself.

  • i got the same thing, and the page one level up produced nearly the same thing. Hitting the link off the main page didn't work either. Ah well.
  • ..for heat absorbtion in order are black, green and red. Green house in winter ok? Guess it beats red.
  • Maybe on Election Day in the U.S. it could automatically change to Red if you're in a GOP kinda mood or Blue if you're voting for the Dems.

    That way the networks could use satellite images to figure out which states are going for which candidates. No more premature victory predictions!
  • ...but I can't tell right now because the link is broken. Here's why I'm concerned: Because black is also a perfect radiator, if used improperly, this could end up increasing your energy bills by radiating all of your house's internal energy. The key would be to make it perfectly black in the visible spectrum but also make it white/reflective in longer wavelengths, like infrared. In the winter, it's more important to keep internally generated heat in rather than absorb outside heat at the risk of losing it all. For instance, when the sun goes down, your house would still be black and radiating!

  • Since it is Earth Week, if you are interested in efficient building, check out the Rocky Mountain Institute [rmi.org]. I just heard Amory Lovins (co-author of Natural Capitalism [natcap.org]) speak last night. In their energy-efficient headquarters, located in the mountains of Colorado, they grow bananas year-round.

    Beat that, black paint people!

  • >Black doesn't just absorb heat better - it also emits it better.

    True, but don't forget that the night is cooler. The longer you can keep your building at night time temperatures the better. And by adjusting the temperature threshold of the paint it may be possible to ensure that ONLY the side that is in direct sunlight is white.

    That would mean: a) your house is losing temperature more quickly and b) your house is gaining temperature more slowly.

  • What I want is paint made out of liquid crystals, so I can have the world's first Mood House.

  • I posted that joke and didn't even realize I was repeating the title. I apologize, with the sort of apology that implies deep regret and personal responsibility when translated into Chinese.

  • Next thing you know, they'll make a paint that will match your lawn and trees so you can have a camoflaged house. Seriously, I think this could cause a significant reduction in utility bills as well as make homes more efficient. If they could only get the paint to produce electricity (give them a few years), you could paint your house with solar cells and drop off the power grid.


    Enigma
  • Hey,

    I don't know many people that would like their house to be black

    It wouldn't have to be. Why not just paint the roof, which on slate houses is near-black already? After all, the sun *is* above us, in the sky.

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • It would be interesting if the color reflected the temperature inside the house...
  • moving to a temperate part of the world, where its a nice 70 degrees all year around. And I dont mean Florida either. "your house is out of white paint. If you wish to continue changing hues, please press yes. Otherwise, add paint to the paint cartridge and press any wall when ready"
  • I think that it would be somewhat cool to have a black house. It would really be noticeable as to where your house was and how much snow was covering it. I wonder if the paint is really some living creature that lives off of our life force or something...aiyahhh!
  • Yeah.. I can just see me trying to get my wife to buy this piece of technology. She would freak if her house changed color without her permission! :)
  • For the best effect your house would have to go from black to white, but I don't know many people that would like their house to be black...

    A black house in the name of saving energy? You must be forgetting about Ed Begley, Jr! [rootnode.org]

    "I'm happier than Ed Begley, Jr. driving to the recycling center in an electric car with a bag full of empties." -- Dennis Miller
  • Now they just need a REAL "mood house", where the color of the paint reflects your state of mind. You know, the house turns bright and color when you're in a good mood, to dark and evil when you're in a bad one... then life will be just like Black & White!

  • gives a whole new meaning.... (Score:4)

    by unformed ( 225214 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @01:33PM (#276063)
    to dropping acid and seeing colors
  • That would look really cool, especially if we added some multicoloured laser effects, a strobe, and a fog machine... one could host the most awesome goth club nights, all we'd have to do is threaten the neighbours with scare tactics so they don't say anything to anyone!

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • Tish! If you want fun, take an infrared laser (or high-power IR laser diode), modulate it with the control codes for most TV/CD/VCR/stereo remotes for on, play and max volume, then spray the side of a handy apartment building.

    Judge the results by the number of lights that turn on at 3am.

    Don't try this at home -- try it on someone else's home.

  • Unless your furniture change colours too, this will be a major headache to all interior designers.



    ====
  • Could you imagine if Tom Green painted his parent's house plaid with this stuff?? I could induce seisures in epileptics whenever the weather changes!!!
  • In summer it would be white stripes on a black background and in winter it would be black stripes on a white background.

    And just to mess with people's minds, I'd post inverse pictures of it on the web.

  • Nah, Emotions + Paint is Emopaint. And the kid-friendly one with primary colors is called Elmopaint.

  • Can you imagine if you had a vindictive girlfriend and she was about to break up with you?

    Yup, she'd help you paint your house ... but think of what each room would look like in just a few months!

    What I want is a house that looks non-descript by day, but totally freaks out in iridescent dayglo swirls at dusk, turns neon at night, and rosy pink or something at dawn.

  • Maybe someone can come up with a paint that changes color with something like a small voltage applied, that way we can change the color as easily as in home architect and remodeling programs, thus bringing "wallpaper" to real wallpaper. Of course, someone would try to hack it, or worse, advertisers would turn the walls of your house into billboards.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @01:38PM (#276072)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Trees around the house works great, that is, until the roting leaves on the roof rot clear thru (then it rains indoors! wheee!)For me, if keepin warm in the winter means having a black house? who cares. I'm depressed as it is, and white in the summer is cool (provided the paint comes with a free pair of shades, damned california sun)
  • $100 monthly bill? you must not live here, or use anything other than a single 45 watt lightbulb
  • You know, I'm absolutely amazed it took engineers around the world so damn long to think up something this simple. I had the idea myself when I was about 6 years old... Personally, I would do it first with Cars, then kids bic ycles, and so on. It's a very big deal to repaint your house, and people will be weary to try something experimental in such a long-term situation.
  • Tie-dye houses
  • These would be "Hypercolor Shirts" ahh the good old 80's !
  • What about a laser system that heats the house to project whats on tv. Maybe I could hook up my Dreamcast.

    Where I live in Cincinnati people would just go insane because you could go from across the street and it could be raining. It sucks here.
    People would pass out because they can't figure out if they are trippin' or not.

    People's brains would just explode from the weird web of colors everywhere.
  • Color changing walls with musical borders [slashdot.org] on the top edge. Now that's a groovy bachelor pad.
  • Emotions + Paint = Emotaint (pronounced E-moe-shaynt)

    IMHO I would be highly upset to bring a chick home thinking my house was white when I left, and black and morbid (d(a)emonic) looking when we got there.

    you big pimp you [antioffline.com]

  • dude, i've got flying toasters in my house...
    (see above posts about dropping acid and laugh, or not really)

    iluvpr0n.
  • No, I think Red would be more appropriate for the Dems. Seriously, all decorating in a house with man and wife is done by the wife; how many women would put up with a house that was snow white on the south side and a light grey on the north?
  • Having lived three years in Colorado, I'd say bananas are appropriate ...
  • You're proably thinking of Hypercolor shirts. Or one of the 300 knock offs. And no, I can't find a decent link with any further info, as Google once again returns nothing but messageboards posts :(

  • I want a color change car. I want to put variable in the color spot on my registration. I bet that would really upset the registration bureau ;)
  • Exception in article: ns9999638 : org.xml.sax.SAXException: FWK005 parse may not be called while parsing. HEH!
  • It probably wouldn't make much difference unless the pool was shallow, but such a material could extend swimming season for a few days, which would be entirely worth it. Not to mention, the paint could act as a quick thermometer during Spring and Fall.

  • Actually, a dark green or even blue would absorb almost as much IR (heat) as black, and not look quite so bad!
  • What's next, then? A multi-colored "housesaver?"

  • Re:Great for pranksters... (Score:3)

    by ninth harmonic ( 413806 ) on Friday April 20, 2001 @08:42PM (#276090)
    Hehe, reminds me of when I used to do metal roof construction and we would have this colorbond touch up paint to touch up the rivets etc so they were the same color as the rest of the roof.

    The thing is that the touch up paint fades much faster than the paint colorbond roofing sheets. On occasion, if I had been irritated by the owner or something, I would write obscene graffiti on their roof, which would only show up in 1 to 2 years time. hehehe


    funny funny, die die
  • It seems like some time in the mid 80's there was a line of color change t-shirts I can't remeber the brand.

    What I remeber most about them is that theymade your armpits really stand out.

    would a color change house or car suffer the same emabrrasing fate
    <KIDVOICE>
    Look ma that house is all dark around the bedrooms , whats that spot on the wall?
    </KIDVOICE>

    I think I will keep this away from my swingin batclor pad and just let my groovy color changing fungi do the work for me.

    Nate

  • hmm
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