Flat Roof Homes And Snow

When it comes to maintaining your home inspection of all areas of your home should be a part of the process.

Flat roof homes and snow.

That means 12 inches of snow on a flat roof creates an additional r 12 of insulation that arrives at a time of year when you most need it. It s true than in a city neighbourhood with predominantly older houses flat roofs stick out but it is the opposite in the country side. In most flat roofed homes heated spaces are situated directly under the roof without any buffer from an unheated attic. They can be extremely low.

This can eventually cause problems with ice dams. For a start there are no tricky gable end spaces to try and navigate when opening up the upper levels in flat roof houses plus you can use the roof itself as an outdoor terrace which will be a. Wind seismic building weight furniture occupants etc. Photo by courtesy of the holmes group.

From an aesthetic standpoint a house in the country with a flat roof blends in much better than a house with a pitched roof. A single slope roof s typical steepness allows for easy snow and water runoff making it great for heavy snow and rain regions. Certainly the weight of snow can add up but your home must support a variety of loads. Snow is actually one of the easiest to design for and all.

As snow piles up all that weight equates to structural stress especially for buildings with flat roofs. This image depicts another benefit of flat roofs. Don t go thinking that modern houses with flat roofs only look good though as these innovative designs actually have practical properties as well. It has a very low slope between 1 4 to 1 2 inch per foot so that it drains water.

Flat roofing is not actually flat. Flat roofs aren t architecturally logical as rain and snow will shed much more quickly off a sloped roof. A flat roof sits cleaner on the horizon and breaks up the scenery less. Flat roofs can t possibly support all the extra weight a totally valid concern but rest assured your architect and engineer have this in mind when designing the roof structure.

But such a low slope holds snow and water much longer than a steeply pitched roof and therefore needs a very different material to stay watertight. If your home has a roof with a substantial pitch ice dams and clogged gutters can still prevent snow from sliding off. Heavy loads of wet snow can eventually lead to shingle damage stress on load bearing walls and even roof collapse. These are created when heat transfer from a home s interior melts the snow on a roof which then refreezes as it makes its way to the outer edges of the roof s surface.

Of course you don t need to live in a modern house to deal with a flat roof. Yet for historic modern style buildings like this old house s cambridge tv project flat roofs are at the core of the architecture meant to reflect the broad horizontal lines of the natural landscape.