Who has a metal roof on their house?

We have metal roofs on the house and all the barns. Snow hooks are a must here in NY unless you don't mind risking your life going out a door with a snow load above you. I LOVE the sound of the rain on the roof and sleep great through it. Hubby can't sleep when it rains. Everyone keeps saying that metal roofs are more expensive but I kind of wonder. They go up so quickly that your labor costs are a lot less. Sure, materials are more but frankly, I think the labor outweighs that. They also last so long that if you plan to stay in the house, I think you recoup the cost. Marisa's roof is already up so she won't have to worry about cost. You can always invest in some ear plugs if the noise bothers someone in the family.

I think that the only metal roofs that get damaged by hail would be light gauge steel. We put heavy gauge steel on ours and it is warranted to not be damaged by hail with a 40 year overall warranty. We love it. This summer we had it put on and it was 1/2 again as expensive as if we had put on new shingles but we felt it would last us our life and we didn't want to have to mess with it again.

We reroofed with metal and did the out buidlings and barn too - best thing we ever did I think. Plus I'll be either too old to care, or dead, when it needs to be redone!

If I may put my 2 cents in here. We had a metal roof on one of our houses and we had no trouble with it. Our house was actually a metal machine shed converted to a house. The roof had been installed over 5/8" OSB with furring strips. We had a walk through attic before getting to the main level. We could never tell it was raining. We had to hear the rain hit the windows to know it was raining. The real downfall to metal roofs is the amount of water it sheds. Go with the largest downspouts you can it will help a lot. The only trouble we had was one winter we had a terrible ice storm and all the water got froze up on the roof and gutters. Took every section of gutter off of my house, came down pretty loud too.

Theront

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We have metal roof, everybody in town has shingles. With two hail storms in less than a year, everybody ELSE had to have a new roof. Ours is fine.

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Alice
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my father still owns his parents home. they bought it in 1946. has had the same roof on since at least the 30s. it's only needed repair a couple of times since 46 for leaks.

I can't afford to roof all of my house but can scavenge enough around the farm to roof my sun room.

mel-

My trailer has a metal roof, I hear people say that I need to coat the roof every 4 years with roof coating so it won't rust/leak.

how often do you coat a tin roof?
Do you coat a metal roof?

During the 3 hurricanes, we only lost a small end section over the porch from our metal roof and that was because the plywood was not covered by the ex in a timely manner during construction. Rainstorms lull me to sleep, but then I read lips and the children (who have normal hearing) wake up when it storms. Harvesting rainwater for the garden is a snap.

Well, guys it must depend on where you live. I asked my insurance agent and several roofers (who I wanted estimates from) and they all recommended that I not go for metal. I went with the experts advice on that one.

Glad it has worked out so well for the rest of you.

Because of the high pitch of my roof the shingles we installed ought to outlive us. All these great new materials does make it easy, whatever you choose.

All the talk about the rain on the roof and how it sounds makes me glad I chose the shingles though. I think that would drive me crazy, even softened by the insulation, etc. What's wind like over it?

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Be careful which experts you listen to. Metal: Materials expensive, less labor. Shingles: Materials cheap, more labor. Roofers make much more on shingles...what might be a one or two day job for a metal might be 5 or 7 days for shingles. Not saying they were wrong in your case...but keep in mind the biases of your chosen experts. And that applies to much more than roofs.

Too true. I got estimates from guys who only put on metal roofs, often commercially and then shingles from guys who work with them. And then my insurance agent, who had just paid out big claims due to hailstorms and metal roofs (some are more than functional afterwards but get 'pings' he said which affects the visual). The guy who put on the shingles took 2 days and only works with shingles and slate (wow--now that's expensive!).

Who knows? We all choose our risks.

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Greetings from Montana! Land of much snow and big hail! We put delta rib metal roof (milk choc. color) on our house, shop , green house, and chicken coop. None have been damaged by hail and they are good in fire prone areas like pine forests. Our insurance company would not insure us without the metal roof. Also the snow does slide off pretty easily and if you dont want to be caught in an avalanche you will need to divert the snow from the area over your doors if they are on the sloped side of the roof.

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www.MontanaSticksAndStones.com at Goshen Farm

I don't have a metal roof on my house, putting metal on my barn this month and had a shop with a metal roof at my old place. They seem to work just fine. The one thing I don't see mentioned that really bugs me about shingles is moss. When I replace the roof on this house I was thinking metal in order to avoid the moss problem and also provide fire protection since I live among lots of trees and it does get to be a fire hazard in the summer. (hot embers landing on all that dried moss!)

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I have a metal roof on my city house, original roof and house is just over 100 yrs old. Just have to paint it every 5 yrs or so.
Rog

My in-laws family homestead is (I think) 150 years old, the metal roof is about 75 years old. It needs to be painted occassionally. The new metal roofs have the paint right in the metal, so I do not think you need to repaint them. One plus with a metal roof is... if lightning strikes the roof, the electricity is defused across the entire roof, so you don't get a fire. One family I know has had lightning strike their old metal roof several times with no resultant fire.

We had a metal roof put on a year ago and really like it. We had a friend do it much cheaper than what it would normally cost and we really have been pleased with it. The bank was pleased that we were having this type of roof put on. The friend that did it said it is really a steel roof and very durable. Our roof has a high pitch and we never have had to remove snow from it and with this it just melts fast. The old roof had a lot of problems with leaks and that is gone.

RenieB

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Ahh, so that is why you don't see lighting rods on Barns with metal roofs.

The lightnight thing reminds me... We do have problems with lightning taking out our phones. It doesn't seem to bother anything else. Must be the way the phone line runs. I buy the cheapest one-hole surge protectors I can that have phone line protection as well. The elec surge protectors are fine but I go through at least one of the phone line protectors a year.

Except where a tree landed on my house the metal roof did great through hurricane Charley. All my neighbors had to redo there roofs several people decided to switch to metal after looking over at my roof.

The metal was put directly over the old shingles with no problem. Also if you can afford it put the metal over plywood with felt. All the roofs that had metal just on the strips the wind ripped all the sheets off. Hail would not be a problem, I had huge chunks of trees and debris hitting my roof at over 140mph with no damage except where the whole tree fell on one side and cracked the support beams underneath.

I have a standing seam metal roof. Decided to put it on instead of shingles due to the high winds we get here. A word of caution, make sure you get them installed correctly. The roof is only 3 years old and we had a little storm cell come through the weekend before labor day, and it tore off a whole side of the roof. I had three different roofing companies come out to look at it. They concluded that it had been installed incorrectly...primarily they used nails instead of screws and had use too few tabs when installing the sheets.

It also didn't help that the pitch of the roof that got riped off is pretty flat, so the wind can get underneath easily....so the installation of the metal trim is very important.

Other than the installation, I love my roof! Unless I've got hail size rain, I barely hear it! I've attached a link showing the house. The roof that blew off is the roof over the second story windows (on the website...the second row of photos)

http://www.hockleyhomesteadfarms.com/photos-house.html

Good luck with your roofing!

Christine