Blue – Blue is an attractive paint color for a house with gray roof shingles. Whether your roof shingles are a medium-toned or dark-toned gray, this color combination can be especially attractive on traditional style homes. Blue is a direct contrast to gray, but there are also gray shingles with bluish undertones that work just as well.
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Is blue a good color for a roof?
A pleasant contrast to any dark roof, Ethereal Blue can serve as either an accent or the foundation of your exterior. It’s airy and full of personality, so if you want a unique exterior that gives your roof something to play off of, this is a great blue paint color option.
Does roof color matter for exterior paint?
Roof color matters when choosing an exterior paint color for your home. Here’s why: – Your roof is a permanent fixture on your home’s exterior, so it’s essential to factor in your roof’s color and its undertones into your exterior color scheme. Until you look carefully at the hues of your roof’s shingles, you may not even realize that your roof contains so many different colors.
Why do houses have blue roofs?
What is a blue roof? “Blue roofs are more proof that sustainability innovation is everywhere,” says Bruce Taylor, president of Enviro-Stewards, an environmental consulting firm. He said his own business was able to cut its water, air conditioning and heating bills significantly after he worked with his landlord to install a blue roof during a roof renovation.
- The company was able to reduce its emissions by 15% per employee thanks to its demonstration “affordable smart blue roof,” as Taylor calls it.
- Blue roofs are still a novel idea, with only a few examples so far worldwide.
- But Taylor says there’s growing interest among businesses and insurance companies.
Taylor’s company is now installing a smart blue roof for Credit Valley Conservation, a conservation authority in Mississauga, Ont. An insurance industry association is covering the costs as a pilot project because of the potential for reducing flood damage risks.
“The number-one insurance claim in Canada is for flooding, and it’s doubled in the last 10 years,” Taylor says. When you get a 100-year storm more frequently due to climate change, the stormwater system wasn’t designed for that and it overflows and creates a lot of damage. A blue roof is a roof adapted to store rainwater.
Valves are installed on stormwater drains to control flow during a rainstorm. The idea is to prevent stormpipes from backing up, which can cause flooding damage to the building and send untreated water into rivers and lakes. “We’re getting more intense and frequent storms due to climate change,” Taylor says.
“When you get a 100-year storm more frequently due to climate change, the system wasn’t designed for that and it overflows and creates a lot of damage.” A small dam-like structure is erected on the roof to contain the rainwater. Water depth typically doesn’t exceed 10 or 15 centimetres. “It would be hard to get more than a few inches because it’s constantly evaporating,” Taylor says.
Your roof is literally a swimming pool liner anyway, so all you’re doing with a blue roof is storing water there. Aerial view of Enviro-Steward’s blue roof under construction. Source: Enviro-Stewards Sensors are installed to detect leaks, measure the water level, gather data on energy savings and gauge weather conditions (hence the term “smart blue roof”). The data can be monitored remotely, and the water can be drained in advance if a storm is expected.
- We put a weather station on the roof,” Taylor says.
- If my weather data says there’s an inch of rain coming, I can drop an inch of water down the storm drain before it starts to rain.
- Then I can take 100 percent of that storm when it comes.” Pipes and valves can also be installed to allow building occupants to use the water for business needs, such as for toilets, irrigation, cooling towers and cleaning machines and equipment.
A blue roof can only be installed on a flat roof, not a peaked one. Buildings built to code generally have enough load bearing capacity and are adequately sealed against water infiltration to permit a blue roof. An installer typically checks the building’s existing roof structure and membrane before proceeding with the installation.
Your building isn’t as hot with a blue roof, so your air conditioning isn’t working as hard. The water containment area can cover all or part of a roof, depending on other structures or equipment present on top of the building. For example, if mechanical equipment is located on the roof, the containment area can be built around it.
Water is typically drained off before the winter. If a roof is peaked or otherwise inappropriate for a blue roof, there is an alternative: setting up a rainwater harvesting tank. This can be used to divert rainwater from your stormpipes and provide water for business uses.
What is the purpose of a blue roof?
Learn about: – Legislation and drivers – Sustainable Urban Drainage is now part of legislation and is a critical part of planning. Blue roofs form part of the options available for SuDS. Design of a blue roof – The incorporation of a blue roof into a project can be at rooftop or podium level.
- A blue roof is designed to attenuate storm water within a void which sits directly above the waterproofing layer and beneath a surface finish such as a vegetated green roof or hard landscaping.
- Drainage and roof deck construction – The discharge rate for the site is set by the local planning authority (LPA).
Many LPA’s are setting limits that equal greenfield run-off rates, 5 – 10 litres per second per hectare. Waterproofing system selection and outlets – Consideration must be given to the appropriate form of waterproofing so that it can meet the demands placed on it by the blue roof.
Blue roof components and surface finishes – The waterproofing and insulation must have the correct structural capacity, along with the void-forming components of the blue roof. In unison they can resist the permanent load of the required finish and any imposed loading. Waterproofing installation, detailing and inspection – British Standards and Systems Codes of Practice for waterproofing detailing should be followed and will provide a guideline to detailing principles, even if they are not specific to a blue roof application.
The maintenance of a blue roof – Maintenance of a blue roof is critical to the viability to its function.
What is the benefit of a blue roof?
For Robert Mugabe’s house, see Blue Roof, A blue roof is a roof of a building that is designed explicitly to provide initial temporary water storage and then gradual release of stored water, typically rainfall. Blue roofs are constructed on flat or low sloped roofs in urban communities where flooding is a risk due to a lack of permeable surfaces for water to infiltrate, or seep back into the ground.
Water is stored in blue roof systems until it either evaporates or is released downstream after the storm event has passed. Blue roofs that are used for temporary rooftop storage can be classified as “active” or “passive” depending on the types of control devices used to regulate drainage of water from the roof.
Blue roofs can provide a number of benefits depending on design. These benefits include temporary storage of rainfall to mitigate runoff impacts, storage for reuse such as irrigation or cooling water makeup, or recreational opportunities. The term blue roof may also be used to indicate roofs that are blue in color.
Should entire house be painted same color?
Should I paint my entire home one color? – As a general rule of thumb, you should never paint your entire home one singular color. That isn’t to say that you can’t use the same color in some capacity throughout your entire home; however, it shouldn’t be the primary wall color in every room.
- If you want to use the same color throughout your home, try implementing different shades of the same color or placing it in different significant areas around your home instead of making it the centerpiece.
- By implementing different shades of the same color or only adding it to individual sections in every space of your home, you can achieve what is known as color continuity.
Color continuity gives your interior space a uniform look that is smooth and seamless while also being very elegant. If you do decide to paint your entire home with one color or variant shades of a particular color, make sure you add in different colors that help accent your primary color choice.
What 2 Colours should not be seen?
Home News
(Image credit: hddigital | Shutterstock ) Try to imagine reddish green — not the dull brown you get when you mix the two pigments together, but rather a color that is somewhat like red and somewhat like green. Or, instead, try to picture yellowish blue — not green, but a hue similar to both yellow and blue.
- Is your mind drawing a blank? That’s because, even though those colors exist, you’ve probably never seen them.
- Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called “forbidden colors.” Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they’re supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.
The limitation results from the way we perceive color in the first place. Cells in the retina called “opponent neurons” fire when stimulated by incoming red light, and this flurry of activity tells the brain we’re looking at something red. Those same opponent neurons are inhibited by green light, and the absence of activity tells the brain we’re seeing green.
Similarly, yellow light excites another set of opponent neurons, but blue light damps them. While most colors induce a mixture of effects in both sets of neurons, which our brains can decode to identify the component parts, red light exactly cancels the effect of green light (and yellow exactly cancels blue), so we can never perceive those colors coming from the same place.
Almost never, that is. Scientists are finding out that these colors can be seen — you just need to know how to look for them. Colors without a name The color revolution started in 1983, when a startling paper by Hewitt Crane, a leading visual scientist, and his colleague Thomas Piantanida appeared in the journal Science.
Titled “On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue,” it argued that forbidden colors can be perceived. The researchers had created images in which red and green stripes (and, in separate images, blue and yellow stripes) ran adjacent to each other. They showed the images to dozens of volunteers, using an eye tracker to hold the images fixed relative to the viewers’ eyes.
This ensured that light from each color stripe always entered the same retinal cells; for example, some cells always received yellow light, while other cells simultaneously received only blue light. Images similar to those used in a famous 1983 experiment in which so-called “forbidden colors” were perceived for the first time. (Image credit: Life’s Little Mysteries) The observers of this unusual visual stimulus reported seeing the borders between the stripes gradually disappear, and the colors seem to flood into each other.
- Amazingly, the image seemed to override their eyes’ opponency mechanism, and they said they perceived colors they’d never seen before.
- Wherever in the image of red and green stripes the observers looked, the color they saw was “simultaneously red and green,” Crane and Piantanida wrote in their paper.
Furthermore, “some observers indicated that although they were aware that what they were viewing was a color (that is, the field was not achromatic), they were unable to name or describe the color. One of these observers was an artist with a large color vocabulary.” Similarly, when the experiment was repeated with the image of blue and yellow stripes, “observers reported seeing the field as simultaneously blue and yellow, regardless of where in the field they turned their attention.” It seemed that forbidden colors were realizable — and glorious to behold! Its name is mud Crane’s and Piantanida’s paper raised eyebrows in the visual science world, but few people addressed its findings.
“It was treated like the crazy old aunt in the attic of vision, the one no one talks about,” said Vince Billock, a vision scientist. Gradually though, variations of the experiment conducted by Billock and others confirmed the initial findings, suggesting that, if you look for them in just the right way, forbidden colors can be seen.
Then, in 2006, Po-Jang Hsieh, then at Dartmouth College, and his colleagues conducted a variation of the 1983 experiment. This time, though, they provided study participants with a color map on a computer screen, and told them to use it to find a match for the color they saw when shown the image of alternating stripes — the color that, in Crane’s and Piantanida’s study, was indescribable.
“Instead of asking participants to report verbally (and hence subjectively), we asked our participants to report their percepts in a more objective way by adjusting the color of a patch to match their perceived color during color mixing. In this way, we discovered that the perceived color during color mixing (e.g., red versus green) is actually a mixture of the two colors, but not a forbidden color,” Hsieh told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
When shown the alternating stripes of red and green, the border between the stripes faded and the colors flowed into each other — an as-yet-unexplained visual process known as “perceptual filling in,” or “image fading.” But when asked to pick out the filled-in color on a color map, study participants had no trouble zeroing in on muddy brown.
The results show that their perceived color during color mixing is just an intermediate color,” Hsieh wrote in an email. So if the color’s name is mud, why couldn’t viewers describe it back in 1983? “There are infinite intermediate colors, It is therefore not surprising that we do not have enough color vocabulary to describe,” he wrote.
“However, just because a color cannot be named, doesn’t mean it is a forbidden color that’s not in the color space.” Color fixation Fortunately for all those rooting for forbidden colors, these scientists’ careers didn’t end in 2006. Billock, now a National Research Council senior associate at the U.S.
Air Force Research Laboratory, has led several experiments over the past decade that he and his colleagues believe prove the existence of forbidden colors. Billock argues that Hsieh’s study failed to generate the colors because it left out a key component of the setup: eye trackers. Hsieh merely had volunteers fix their gaze on striped images; he didn’t use retinal stabilization.
“I don’t think that Hsieh’s colors are the same ones we saw. I’ve tried image fading under steady fixation and I don’t see the same colors that I saw using artificial retinal stabilization,” Billock said. In general, he explained, steady eye fixation never gives as powerful an effect as retinal stabilization, failing to generate other visual effects that have been observed when images are stabilized.
Hseih et al.’s experiment is valid for their stimuli, but says nothing about colors achieved via more powerful methods.” Recent research by Billock and others has continued to confirm the existence of forbidden colors in situations where striped images are retinally stabilized, and when the stripes of opponent colors are equally bright.
When one is brighter than the other, Billock said, “we got pattern formation and other effects, including muddy and olive-like mixture colors that are probably closer to what Hseih saw.” When the experiment is done correctly, he said, the perceived color was not muddy at all, but surprisingly vivid: “It was like seeing purple for the first time and calling it bluish red.” The scientists are still trying to identify the exact mechanism that allows people to perceive forbidden colors, but Billock thinks the basic idea is that the colors’ canceling effect is being overriden.
When an image of red and green (or blue and yellow) stripes is stabilized relative to the retina, each opponent neuron only receives one color of light. Imagine two such neurons: one flooded with blue light and another, yellow. “I think what stabilization does (and what enhances) is to abolish the competitive interaction between the two neurons so that both are free to respond at the same time and the result would be experienced as bluish yellow,” he said.
You may never experience such a color in nature, or on the color wheel — a schematic diagram designed to accomodate the colors we normally perceive — but perhaps, someday, someone will invent a handheld forbidden color viewer with a built-in eye tracker.
- And when you peek in, it will be like seeing purple for the first time.
- Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @ nattyover,
- Follow Life’s Little Mysteries on Twitter @ llmysteries, then join us on Facebook,
- Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope.
What exterior colors make a house look bigger?
Choose light colors – Making the exterior of your home a light color is the best way to make your home look larger, brighter, and more inviting. Light colors such as white, ivory, pale gray, and sage green reflect higher amounts of light than dark colors, tricking the eye into perceiving the home as larger than it is.
Reflecting the light from the sun also diverts heat from your home during the sunny, warm months of summer, keeping your home at a cooler, more comfortable temperature without forcing you to crank up the air conditioning. White, in particular, has been a popular choice among homeowners for centuries because it instills a structure with a certain air of timeless grandeur.
This color is especially popular with traditional classical architecture, but it can complement homes of any size, style, or location. When considering property sales data, white homes tend to be most attractive to buyers. This sleek, clean shade is attention-grabbing while acting as a clean slate.
What color looks best on blue undertones?
Blue Undertones –
- People on the deepest end of the skin spectrum – like model and designer Alex Wek (pictured at left) – often have blue undertones.
- Here’s some tips to bring out the best in blue undertones!
- Complimentary Color Pairings
- Blue undertones look their best in rosey pinks, reds, plums, burgundies, golds, and browns.
- EYES
Winning eye makeup combos include plum and brown or deep pink and brown. Rose, burgundy and maroon eyeshadows will also make your eyes sparkle. If you’re feeling extra daring, add a touch of yellow or green in the corner of your eye to give plum eyeshadow an extra oomph.
- For a more casual look, play with dusty pink or rose lip sticks, stains and glosses.
- BLUSH
- Add some color with pink, rose, plum or maroon.
- Color Me Not
- Blue undertones should stay away from using white, gray, and pastel cosmetics.
- Inspirations
: Cosmetics Guide for Blue Undertones — International Spectrum Cosmetics
What plants go with a blue house?
Flower Ideas for a Blue House Are you stuck on trying to decide what plantings will look best against a blue home? Use the iScape app and test out all types of colors for your garden before actually installing a thing. It’s easy to do. Simply take a photo of a home, upload it to iScape, and start adding amazing flowering perennials, shrubs, and trees.
- Blue is a cool-toned color for a house and homeowners can be frozen with indecision with the prospect of adding too much color in the plantings.
- Most often we see white flowers and subtle green landscaping with blue homes.
- These colors are cool like the home’s paint.
- Good perennials and shrubs with white flowers that match well with blue paint are white shades of delphinium, hydrangea, hosta, rose, lily of the valley, petunias, iris, lilies, or vinca.
Looking at these before and after images from iScape, you can see that bold flower color can make a stunning impact on the look of the home. What a punch of happiness and color complementing bold hues add. Contrasting flower color is what can add energetic and impactful curb appeal.
By adding warmer-leaning flowering plants to the mix, it truly lifts the curb appeal for the house. Red zinnias and roses; pink lilies and phlox; purple allium, liatris and coneflowers; yellow daisies, marigolds and echinacea; orange lilies and pentas. Revving up the home color by adding lots of flowering variety can make the home standout in a positive way in the neighborhood.
and test out flower and plant varieties for a homeowners landscape. Compare cool tones to warm tones and see what works best quickly and easily. Or, if you need some design help, now and let the iScape Pro’s help guide you! iScape it! : Flower Ideas for a Blue House