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Industrial designer Joe Doucet has developed a paint for structures that changes color when the temperature outside changes to either retain or reflect the sun’s heat.
Why It Hits: Homebuilders, commercial designers, and municipal governments have been exploring ways to use paints to reduce surface temperatures of buildings and streets and curb the “heat island effect” in dense urban areas. Doucet’s invention could bring this power to homeowners and landlords with a creative twist.
Behind the Shades: Do you need a fresh coat of “climate-adaptive” paint?
- The patent-pending paint changes the facade of a building to black when the outside temperature goes below 77 degrees Fahrenheit and turns white when it goes above that temperature.
- The paint can also be mixed with other tints. So, adding blue would change that black-and-white paradigm to different shades of blue.
- Although Doucet says the paint will likely cost up to five times as much as a regular can of paint, it’s estimated to save consumers an average of 20%-30% in energy costs — not a bad trade-off.
Final Coat: The paint took two years to develop (and over 100 attempts) and is a mix between typical latex house paint and a proprietary formula. Doucet tested it by building two identical scale models of a home he was designing, painting one white and the other black when deciding which color to use. He found a double-digit difference in the indoor temperatures of each structure, which kicked off the changing-color paint idea.
Doucet stressed to Fast Company that he had no plans to start a paint company but instead hoped to license the formula to paint manufacturers — which could spark a feeding frenzy for the rights. This could get messy.
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