Not the stuff for painting on flat roofs. Masonry paint containing glass-beads to reflect sunlight back to where it came from, like car number plates and road signs reflecting headlights. From an old hand at Covers builders merchs, they sold it about 10 years ago, but it produced too much glare, precisely why I'm after it. If that was the case, reflecting but not directly back to its origin, then probably random diameter beads. It seems you can get Kg or more packs of small glass beads for castering into road marking paint while still wet, but not stated what diameter beads, so probably not uniform. I want to repaint vertical rendering with such paint to counter solar gain, but if applying small glass beads, how to do so to a vertical surface?
Solar reflective paint
Jul 19, 2026
Last reply: 14 hours ago
4 Replies
Search for ballotini
Just cover the house with old faulty solar panels. I came off the brow of a hill and nearly crashed from the glare of a roof of solar panels. I couldn't see a damn thing
It looks like for sun heat reflection you need beads of diameter 30 to
50 micron. For "sand" blasting, road line painting and resin bulking out, much larger diameter and less tightly sieved. I've a couple of rolls of old road sign reflective tape, that were ditched because the bonding adhesive had failed. I'll try putting in an old coffee grinder and see what emerges, I think it is beads in resin on some sort of tape then adhesive, then anti-stick tape. I'm amazed how collimated the reflection is. Put some across the room and shine a torch at it and the torch has to be near enough covering your eye before the return flares up.
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If you want micro glass particles.
You could probably add these to exterior grade paint
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