NightHawkInLight
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2023–2026
40:14 · 1.3M views · Jul 1, 2023
NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.
It comes up whenever radiative cooling coatings are in the news, as a hands-on DIY guide that shows the approach working with household materials.
8 comments from Hacker News
Here is a frankly incredible video of how you could make such a paint if you were so inclined. I don't think it's very practical, but the video is very interesting anyways this video
There's an interesting guide on how to make radiative cooling paint from common ingredients complete with an explanation why it works: this video The catch is that such paint is not particularly robust, much less weatherproof. Beats yogurt I guess, which tends to smell as it turns in sunlight. I have roof windows and was wondering how much I could gain from panels painted like that, but most likely as much as I would using the next best thing - a window sunshade, which I'm using already.
You might like NightHawkInLight's videos on the topic[0] and Tech Ingredients[1] - they've been working on making paint using this technology with an at-home DIY process and experimenting with it. [0] this video [1] [LINK]
Weirdly, you can already get decent results with a material that can be prepared at home: this video It doesn't have all the properties necessary to call it paint, but apparently it does the job.
It's a thing in from thousands of years ago [LINK] and today [LINK] for PDRC there are a couple good videos about it from NightHawkInLight [LINK] , this video and Tech Ingredients [LINK] [LINK]