Being the effect of green roofs on energy use closely related to specific climate conditions. In the following a geographically explicit investigation of the effects of thermal insulation, growing medium and plant selection on the thermal efficacy of the installation of green roofs is proposed.
This section summarizes the findings related to a number of case studies about green roofs and their thermal behaviour both monitored and modelled. Green roofs installed on non-insulated and well-insulated rooftops show distinct thermal behaviour depending on climate.
The growing medium of green roofs constitutes additional thermal insulation that in non-insulated rooftops can be beneficial or detrimental …show more content…
[122] compared the thermal behaviour of the same green roof installed in Taipei and Chiayi under tropical and subtropical island climates, respectively. The green roof installed in Chiayi showed an overall better thermal endeavour than in Taipei confirming the importance of the climatic conditions in assessing the effectiveness of green roofs. Nevertheless, in both cases, the green roofs showed a cooling effect during the daytimes and an insulating effect during the night times. During the daytime, the green roofs decreased the indoor temperature by about 8%, but during rainy days their effectiveness considerably …show more content…
The results showed that during summer the energy consumption for the green roof building was lower by about 5% than the energy demand for the same building without green roof (i.e., base case scenario). Besides, in winter the green roof deployment entails higher energy consumption. Altogether, the difference in the year-round energy demand for the building with and without green roof was negligible.
Other studies investigated the potential of a Peanut green roof on an insulated rooftop under tropical climate conditions in Hong Kong. The study showed that the deployment of a green roof led to an increase in summer cooling energy loads [128] [131]. Besides, when Sedum was used on the green roof the building energy demand decreased under all the weather conditions [128]. This last result indicated that the vegetation species can influence the green roof thermal