Local article in newspaper paper says two homes in a mid price subdivision have melting vinyl caused by reflections from next door house’s high reflectance energy efficient windows. they had a pix of the melting- looked like giant paint type bubbles
Edited 5/2/2009 1:23 pm ET by edwardh1
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Yep, happens fairly regularly, when a neighboring house just happens to be situated a certain way. And you should see what a slightly exuberant charcoal grill fire can do.
Probably one of those subdivisions where the houses are 3 feet apart...
I STILL swear one of my co-worker's nylon tool bags caught on fire, due to a reflection from a 1 x 1 window. He had taken it off and set it on the driveway outside the shop for a few minutes. Next thing we knew, it just burst into flames!
But, having spent a fair amout of time working in between these houses (New Urbanistic Development, so they were close together) doing exterior trim, I knew those little 1x windows could reflect a lot of heat. I could feel it as I walked by, like wow!, what was that heat flash?
Nobody ever believed my theory, btw.
(Also, it was about 110 degrees that day.)
There's other things that melt vinyl. Bout 20 years ago, I was working on a subdivision trim crew. Cabinet guys had just been in, and chucked all their boxes off the back porch and up against the house.
It took a lot of medication to trim those sheit boxes, and after one of the prescribed breaks on that back deck, we hear cries or "far, far"
Wild roach, don't let anybody tell ya, pot ain't hazardous to your health... burning, melting vinyl makes you lose your appetite quickly.
Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill
I would set him in chains at the top of the hill
Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after"
This sounds like a job for the Mythbusters
No myth. This was discussed a while ago: http://forums.taunton.com/tp-breaktime/messages?msg=85134.1 Apparently, it's quite uncommmon, but can happen.
I particularly like this pic: http://forums.taunton.com/n/mb/at.asp?webtag=tp-breaktime&guid=48D88038-9DFA-4373-80EC-3F2DE56BD682&frames=no because you can see the path of the reflection as the sun travels across the sky
Thats the look of the pix shown in out newspaper
IIRC they already did it...
siding melts from focused sunlight....
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming<!----><!----><!---->
WOW!!! What a Ride!
Forget the primal scream, just ROAR!!!
"Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints"
There is a subdivision close to me built in the mid-late 80's.
The "builder" (using that term very loosely here)had okayed
the used of a reflective sheathing (I think it was ThermoPly) behind the
vinyl siding. Nearly every house with a good amount of southern exposure had melting/wavy siding as a result. Surprisingly, many areas showed the siding was really thinned out from the heat, so it not only was the ThermoPly, but also thin gauge cheapo siding.