The short answer is no…BUT! If you add a thermal break and a Radiant barrier you can easily achieve a 50 plus drop in attic temperature. We have consistently dropped attic temps from the 160-degree mark to about 103 degrees and it doesn’t matter if the roof is asphalt shingle, wood shake or metal roof.
This home had over 160-degree attic temperature which made the upstairs master bedroom unbearable. We installed our “system” and during the hottest week on record, the master bedroom was the coolest it had ever been. This “system” really works!
Stay tuned for how we do it or look at our Energy Efficient Roof Ventilation System FAQ page.
Have you ever wondered how the vertical standing seam panels are lined up correctly on a gable roof? As you know a gable roof is a simple up and over roofline much like a small two-man pup tent is. In this case, you simply measure to the middle to determine how wide a panel to start with. Then you start at one end and install the panels one at a time working from one end to the other.
On a hip roof, it is much more difficult. If you look at a hip roof you will notice a that as the hip goes from the peak to the eave that each panel gets shorter until it ends. Therefore if you started at one end the panel would be so small that it would be impossible to know if it was correctly lined up until about the halfway point. Most metal roofinstallers make the panels and loosely lay them on the deck until they get to the halfway point. Then they get them lined up and start seaming them. This is still not very precise. As far as I know, we are the only installers that hand make a double male leg panel. We install this panel in the very center and then we install all the panels to the left and then start at the middle and install all of the panels to the right to make a perfectly aligned roof. As you can see from this photo the center panel is the panel we installed first. Then we installed from the center out all the panels on the left and right. The difficult part is hand make the center panel. Our installers excel at hand made flashing and you can’t tell the difference between their hand bent panel and the machine extruded panels.
Does solar work and is it worth the cost is a question we receive often. Here is an application where the answer is a resounding YES! to both. As you can see from the photo below we installed in a small vented ridge vent 8-4″ DC powered fans.
We then installed a small 50 watt solar panel and attached the panel to the seams of the standing seam metal roof. There are no roof penetrations and the fans and solar panel are warrantied for 20 years. That’s at least 20 years of effective attic venting for very few pennies!
For more information please visit AlphaRain.com or call us at 540-222-1642.
Our first attempt at installing a roof ventilation system worked great but was very expensive and labor intensive. As you can see this prototype started with a bubble foil bubble insulator and then a cumbersome wooden counter batten system Even though it really cooled the interior of this historic renovation on this converted barn it was labor intensive and expensive.
In our next post we will share with you our next step in the development of our roof ventilation system.
For more information please visit us at AlphaRain.com or call us at 540-222-1642.
In our last post, we left you with our challenge on how to install this particular copper roof. As we noted we had a curved convex deck and a curved or convex hip as well as wider panels that our pan machine could make as well as a single lock hand-crimped 1″ standing seam application. The solution was pretty simple: we unpacked all of our hand tools from generations gone by and attacked the problem like our tinsmith forefather’s would have.
Here are the results: these hand made panels are hand-formed, hand-crimped and curved using a tool similar to the tool used on the male end of downspouts so that the panels are curved to match the deck. Simple right? I believe we have the best craftsmen in Northern Virginia!
For more information please visit our website at AlphaRain.com or call us at 540-222-1642.
What is a W Valley? On our roofs that we install they all have what we call a W valley, the reason this is so important is that the traditional valleys can leak. A W valley will not leak, in fact on over 500 metal roofs installed with W Valleys we have never have one leak, however on less roofs installed with a normal Valley, we have had many of those leak. We know better than most that normal valleys will leak. The picture above is a normal Metal Roofing W Valley, and the picture below is a traditional metal roofing valley. Take a look at the video I did showing samples of both and how the metal roofing fits panels fit into the valleys and the potential leaks that will occur on the normal metal roofing valley.
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Here is the link to the video that I did with the W Valley
We are installing an under roof ventilation system with a standing seam metal roof on an older farmhouse in Culpeper VA from the early 1900s.
I recorded a video on-site that I have put a link to below. I show in the video the under roof ventilation system before the metal roof has been installed, and how we are able to allow the air to flow through the drip edge that we custom make on the job site. The ventilation panels are about the size of a sheet of plywood and go down on top of a radiant barrier that we install first over the roof deck or skip sheathing. The Ventilation panels are called Therma-Vent. These panels allow for the roof to vent air through channels that run vertically up the panels and then the air escapes through a vented ridge cap.
Please take a look at our video and below and contact us for more information about metal roofing and our under roof ventilation system.
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540-222-1642
Here is the video that we recorded in Culpeper Virginia about the on-site job where we are installing the roof ventilation system with a metal roof.
What are thermal breaks? They are any form of solid insulation that doesn’t allow cold or hot to transfer to an adjacent surface. To demonstrate how this works I took a Styrofoam cup and filled it with boiling water. Then I took a temperature reading of the water with a laser thermometer. The temp of the water was 185 f. The temp of the Styrofoam cup was 94 f. I slid a card board sleeve on the cup and due to air ventilation under the sleeve the temp was around 72 f.
When we install our Therma vent insulation system this same principal is at work. On one test we did the temp on the roof was 165 f and the temp in the attic was 150 f. After installing the thermal breaks the temp in the attic was reduced to 103f. We thought that was amazing.
This is a video describing our custom ventilation system and its built in thermal break:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX_l3e1qPMw
For more information visit us at Alpha Rain.com (540) 222-1642
What in the world is oil canning? In the vernacular of metal roof installers oil canning is when a metal roof, particularly standing seam metal roofs, has bulges and ripples in it. This phenomenon occurs for a plethora (I always wanted to use that word in a blog) of reasons. The main culprit is the roof deck. Think of it this way, the deck of the roof is the bones and the metal roofing VA is the skin. However the bones lay, that is how the skin is going to lay. If the deck has as little as a 1/8 inch deflection then that panel will not lay flat. Here are some more reasons, if the master coil is slit with more tension on one of the decoilers then it will keep that tension in that coil and the panel won’t lay perfectly flat. Add to that humidity and when the humidity around the roof is different it will oil can.
These types of roof also expand and contract with heat or cold weather. A 50 foot panel will “stretch” as much as ¼ of an inch between the summer and winter months. In these panels we actually use clips that allow the panels to expand and contract. If you compare the new steel panels with the old tin panels you can see that we have made some headway on reducing oil canning. However we don’t think we will ever be able to eliminate it altogether.
For more information on oil canning and other elements of standing seam metal roofing VA please visit us at AlphaRain.com or call us at (540) 222-1642
Metal Roofing VA introduces ventilation to the roof and attic. It reflects radiant heat with the use of a radiant barrier and it stops the conduction of heat in the summer and cold in the winter into the attic space.
How it works: the drip edge at the lower edge of the roof has an air gap below it where air can enter. As the air under the roof is heated by the sun, and as hot air rises exiting the vented ridge vent then cooler air is drawn in at the eave. As long as hot air rises (we don’t think a law can be passed to stop that) then this becomes an automatic air ventilation machine. There is a Styrofoam panel with grooves in it to enhance the air movement and to create a thermal break where cold or heat cannot be conducted into the house.
The home above is located in Charlottesville, Virginia and you can see how the panels are being installed right on top of the foam panel. The radiant barrier is under the panel and the air pathway is under the panel as well.
We will be happy to show you a prototype of this system where we actually disassemble a model of this unique but effective approach to ventilating older homes.
For further information please call 540-222-1642 or visit our website @ AlphaRain.com for Metal Roofing VA.
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