Ceramic Coatings for Increased Insulation

Ceramic coating has been around for almost 20 years and is highly effective in preventing unnecessary heat loss or gain in residential and commercial structures.

Inspired in part by the ceramic tiles that NASA uses on the Space Shuttle, a ceramic coating is a paint mixed with one or more ceramic compounds for application via spray or roller to exterior and interior surfaces. Depending on the ceramic compounds used (there are hundreds of varieties), this insulating product has the ability to prevent heat transfer and heat loading onto a structure. This means heat will not transfer into or out of a building.

Insulation and Emissivity

Unlike fiberglass insulation, whose R-value rating assumes heat loading by a building and simply measures the rate at which that heat is transferred, ceramic coatings are not given an R-value rating. Instead, they are rated by “emissivity.” a measure of both their ability to reflect heat and the amount of heat that is loaded onto a surface.

“The true key to insulation is preventing heat load,” says J.E. Pritchett, founder and developer of SuperTherm, a ceramic coating product produced by Superior Products International. The concept is simple: Why use fiberglass insulation to slow the transfer of heat into a building when you can just prevent that heat from ever loading onto the building in the first place? If heat is kept off the structure to begin with, that fiberglass insulation becomes unnecessary. It’s a change in the way we think about insulating our homes against energy lost. “R rating is for the 20th century,” says Pritchett. “Emissivity is 21st century.”

Blocking Heat Buildup

Blocking heat buildup is a complicated task. Heat comes in three forms: ultra-violet (UV), visible light, and infrared (IR). A quality ceramic coating will block all three, especially IR, which is responsible for roughly 57 percent of heat load on a building. “Some ceramic paints claim to block all heat caused by UV,” says Pritchett, “but UV only accounts for three percent of heat load on a building.”

Consumers should be careful to distinguish between purely reflective coatings and true insulating coatings. Reflective coatings only perform when clean and will not block all forms of heat, but a coating with insulative and reflective qualities will block more than one form of heat. “SuperTherm uses four ceramic compounds to block short-wave radiation, IR, and to block the conductivity of heat through the surface,” claims Pritchett. “It’s not just a reflective coating.”