LB was not made for heat. On days like this I fleetingly suffer a twinge of guilt for ever dragging him out here in the first place – but then I remember that he was born in a place substantially hotter yet, so his adoption was more along the lines of a rescue.
The poor guy spent the entire afternoon under the Lair. Because inside was too hot.
Along about 8:30 PM, he gave me a sign that the heat was starting to get to him. This was a sign peculiar to Little Bear. You see, every indisposition Little Bear ever suffers, no matter how minor, goes straight to his gut. This evening I was just settling down to watch a movie on my ‘pooter when there was this…scent.
More like a stench, actually. Little Bear had snuck up behind my chair, laid himself down full-length, and unburdened himself of an absolutely devastating fart. It was the sort of thing that said, without anyone having to say a single word, “This dog must go outside this very moment.”
And so he did. Bugs and all, I just left the door open because then the boys could come in whenever they had their issues worked out, and anyway there’s not a breath of wind and I’m thinking of taking the chainsaw to the walls. If I owned a cot I think I’d go sleep out in the yard; the loft won’t cool down until the wee hours, I just know it.
Eons ago, my father and uncle spent a weekend applying what they called “aluminum paint” to Grandma’s metal roof. It was some sort of bright silver concoction available from the local country hardware store, supposedly with tiny aluminum flakes in it. Anyway, judging by its popularity it seemed the default coating for metal roofs in the area. Even as a tyke I was aware of the summer temperature difference between the second floor bedrooms at Grandma’s and those in houses with shingle roofs.
I’ve smeared that gunk on the roof of the trailer we lived in when I was 14-sort of the consistency of a milkshake-aluminum-colored. It was supposed to seal leaks and reflect heat. You smeared it on with an old broom. Can’t vouch for the stuff as far as heat relection goes.
Back in the 1990s, when I was working at Palomar Observatory, an amateur astronomer asked me what we used to paint the telescope domes, so that he could use the same stuff for his new ‘scope dome in the low desert of south-eastern California.
I did “extensive research” (asked the observatory painter what he used on the domes) and he told me “Glidden Metal Latex”, rather than aluminum paint. He was rather down on aluminum paint. The sun light penetrates the clear paint and bounces around between the flakes of aluminum until it is absorbed as heat. The Metal Latex is opaque and the pigment is titanium dioxide, the whitest chemical there is. The only better reflector that we had was the vacuum-deposited aluminum film on the surface of the telescope mirrors. Those are so reflective that you can’t see where the surface of the glass is, only yourself and the opposite side of the dome. We also had aluminum foil alternating with special paper in the vacuum chambers of the storage dewar flasks for our liquid nitrogen and liquid helium, which we used to cool (to about 4 degrees Kelvin) the astronomical cameras. That was sort of extreme, but the principles are the same for houses.
The amateur wrote back to me to say that his dome, with the Glidden Metal Latex, ran about 2 to 3 degrees warmer in the desert summer afternoon, with the door closed, than the outside air. He had no utility power to run an air conditioner, so he was happy with the best dome paint.
Our professional domes were (are) insulated with thin (about 2 inches thick) sheet steel boxes that form the inside wall of the big domes. They are filled with only aluminum foil and dead-air space. That works very well.
One may also glue a single layer of aluminum foil, shiny side out, to the outside of the roof and-or walls that get the sun. I do not know which may be less expensive, the foil and glue or the Metal Latex over a good primer. Of course, if one used the foil for the outside of the house, it would be reminiscent of the whorehouse in the Firefly series. Now, where did all those girls go?
All the Best,
Speaker