EXTERIORS : When It’s Time for New Roof, the Sky’s the Limit
It’s a safe bet that if your house is more than 15 years old--as tens of thousands of Orange County houses are--you’ve got a re-roofing in your future.
And when you start looking, you’ll find that picking out roofing material is harder than selecting the right flavor at a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor.
In fact, if there were only 31 flavors of roofing, life would be easy, indeed.
For many, the only easy choice is to omit wood roofing from the list of possibilities. Beyond that, there are a multitude of composite--or asphalt--shingle products, as well as glazed and unglazed clay tile and concrete tiles and shingles; lightweight fiber-cement and fiberglass copies of tiles, shingles, shakes and slates; painted and stone-coated metal shingles and tiles; copper tiles; real slate, and a high-tech plastic copy of wood shakes that has just come onto the market.
The roofing industry is as susceptible to changes in taste as any other and Southern California’s seemingly endless vista of mass-produced tract homes provides a history of the modern roof, beginning with the asphalt shingles and crushed-rock roofs in the first of the post-World War II building booms.
Roofs made of alternating layers of hot tar and felt paper and topped with colored crushed rock pretty much disappeared by 1960 and asphalt shingles began giving way to the cedar shakes and shingles that soon became just about every builder’s choice.
While wood remained king throughout the 1970s, builders in the planned communities of Mission Viejo and Irvine introduced the clay tile roof to mass-produced housing by crowning the most expensive homes in their portfolios with sinuous S tiles in the Spanish and Italian tradition.
By the early 1980s, the onslaught of the Mediterranean architectural style created a market for less-expensive concrete copies of kiln-fired clay--a market that still is going strong today.
But that’s just what the builders use for new homes.
In the re-roofing market, the typical homeowner starts off shopping with one eye on appearance, the other on price. But the plethora of new products requires careful consideration of several other factors, including fire ratings, weight and the quality of materials in the roofing subsystem--the parts you don’t see.
Even when the only concerns are cost and appearance, plowing through brochures for the products available can make your eyes swim.
“There were thousands and thousands of homes built with shakes and shingles in Southern California during the 1960s and ‘70s, and replacing them with look-alikes that don’t burn has created a whole industry “ says Michael Porzio, sales manager for Pacific Supply Co. in Orange. The regional wholesaler and retailer of roofing material sells scores of products by dozens of manufacturers.
Composite shingles alone make up a huge part of the market, with dozens of styles, colors and quality levels ranging from thin, flat, recession-pinched budget brands to fancy, rough-textured styles that have deep shadow lines to emulate the look of wood shakes as closely as possible. Most composite shingles today are made of fiberglass-reinforced asphalt, some use a heavy paper reinforcing material.
Prices for re-roofing jobs vary based on the individual requirements of each home, but composite shingles generally are the least expensive, typically running $150 to $300 per 100 square feet, installed.
The universal unit for weighing, pricing and measuring roofing is the square--the amount of material needed to cover a 10-by-10-foot area, or 100 square feet.
The installed price of a wood-shake roof can run $20 to $300 per square; clay, concrete and cement-fiber tile roofs range from $275 to $350 per square; stone-coated or painted steel roofs range from $300 to $350 a square; the plastic material ranges from $400 to $500 a square and copper and slate roofs start at about $500 per square and rise rapidly.
For those considering a do-it-yourself re-roofing, labor generally is 60% to 70% of the cost, Porzio said.
While finding the material in a style and color that fits the household budget is what is on most minds when thoughts turn to roofing, other considerations have to be faced, too.
A roof is a system of components, and while the shingles or tiles that most of us end up with are the visible part of the system, they often aren’t the most expensive or even the most important, Porzio said.
And as with most things, the quality of a roof system is indicated by price; you get what you pay for.
BELOW THE SURFACE
In most systems, the visible roofing material sits atop plywood sheathing that covers the entire roof and itself is covered with waterproof roofing paper--or felt--that comes in various weights.
While things can be done to excess, the thicker the plywood and the heavier the felt--or the more layers of felt applied--the better the weight-carrying abilities of the subsystem and the water- and fireproofing capabilities of the entire roof.
The peaks of a roof must be covered with ridge caps that are shaped like inverted V s and shed water down both slopes; the valleys, V -shaped gullies where two sloping sections of roof meet, must be thoroughly waterproofed using either metal channel or, with composite shingle roofs, properly interwoven shingles. Especially with the so-called valley metals, expensive materials like lead or copper last much longer than thin galvanized or stamped and painted metal.
Areas where the roof is pierced by vent pipes, skylights or chimneys must be waterproofed with metal flashings that divert water from the inevitable gaps where the roofing material is cut to fit around the protrusion. Skimping here can render an entire roofing job worthless.
Finally, the edges of the roof must be sealed to keep water from blowing under the roofing material and leaking into the building and to keep wind--especially Orange County’s fierce Santa Ana windstorms--from lifting the roofing material and blowing it out to sea.
And that’s just to make sure the roof doesn’t leak.
TESTED BY FIRE
There’s another purpose for a roof: fire safety.
Roofing is graded as Class A, B or C depending on the material and the quality of the sub-roof system over which it is applied.
The ratings--A is best--are determined by several tests and are applied both to the roofing material and the entire roof system.
Class A roof materials are defined by Underwriters Laboratories as “not readily flammable” in severe fire exposures (determined in tests that subject the material to direct flame and low wind conditions and clock how long it takes for a fire to start, how far it spreads from the point of ignition and how far upwind from the flames burning embers can still ignite smaller fires). Class A materials also offer “a fairly high degree of fire protection” to the plywood roof deck, the UL standard says, and “do not slip from position; possess no flying brand hazard, and do not require frequent repairs to maintain.”
Class B roofs “are effective against moderate fire exposures . . . offer a moderate degree of protection” to the roof deck and require “occasional repairs.”
Class C roofing--best described as raw wood shingles or shakes--are effective against “light fire exposure,” provide “some protection” to roof decks and require more frequent repair than the other classes.
With the exception of wood shakes and shingles, which come only with Class C and, when treated with fire-retardant chemicals, Class B ratings, most roofing material today is sold as Class A material.
But the ultimate rating depends on the subsystem over which the roofing is laid. In other words, buying a Class A tile does not automatically ensure a Class A roof, said David Poindexter, manager of training for the Roofing Industry Educational Institute in Englewood, Colo.
For instance, there are some lightweight Class A materials, including coated steel and molded plastic, that drop to a Class C rating when installed directly over an existing wood-shingle roof to save the cost of tearing off the old roof.
A controversy is brewing in the roofing industry over that point, with manufacturers and suppliers of steel roofing arguing that the burning block fire test does not adequately assess the fire safety of their systems.
“We want a fair test and a chance to prove that steel is just as safe over shingles,” said Kory Frost, a spokesman for Cal-Pac Roofing Inc. in Anaheim, a major distributor and installer of decorative steel roofing systems.
The fire issue won’t be resolved quickly, however, and consumers who place fire safety above all else should obtain and study the safety literature supplied by makers of all the various roofing materials, Poindexter said.
HEAVY LOAD
A final issue in choosing roofing material, and one that is easier to deal with than the fire safety controversy, is weight.
Most homes built in Southern California through the early 1980s were engineered to support a roof system that weighs 700 to 900 pounds per square.
But newer homes, which most often sport concrete tile roofs, have been engineered to carry loads of up to 1,200 pounds a square and remain the best platform for the heavyweight concrete products, roofers say.
Manufacturers’ brochures for concrete tiles often cite weights ranging from 800 to 900 pounds per square--but do not deal with the additional 100 to 150 pounds that the plywood sheathing and roofing felt can add, nor does it include the water absorption of some unglazed tiles, which can add to their weight during a rainstorm, said Porzio at Pacific Supply.
Owners of older homes who have bought concrete tiles often find that they must pay thousands of dollars to beef up the roof supports before the tiles can be laid down.
It is the quest for lightweight and fire-resistant alternatives to wood and clay and concrete tile roofs that has given rise to the newest roofing materials: the so-called lightweight products for the re-roofing market.
The oldest of these--and the heaviest--are made of cement reinforced with wood fibers or strands of fiberglass and can tip the scales at half or less the weight of their concrete cousins. They are molded to look more or less like Spanish or Mission tile, slate and wood shakes and shingles and, like the originals, absorb water and get heavier in wet weather.
Even lighter are the steel roofing products, usually stamped in large sheets to resemble sections of curved tile or flat shingles and coated with colored crushed stone for texture and color. Steel systems such as those used by Cal-Pac weigh in at about 150 pounds per square--about 300 pounds per square when installed over plywood sheathing and roof paper--and copper roofing, manufactured as individual shingles or as sheets of thin stamped shingles mounted on an asphalt base, run from about 140 to 275 pounds per square.
In contrast, wood shakes and shingles typically weigh about 250 pounds per square before installation, and can double their weight when saturated in a rainstorm.
Composite shingles vary depending on quality of the material, but typically range from 200 to 350 pounds per square.
In the what-will-they-think-of-next category, one of the newest products--still not available through any Orange County distributor--is a molded plastic replica of wood shakes manufactured by Eiger Building Products, a Florida company. Considered a premium roof, the plastic shakes can run from $400 to $500 a square installed.
It is a truly hi-tech product that uses a General Electric Corp. molded resin made in part from plastic reclaimed from discarded computer terminals. It weighs in at a mere 90 pounds per square, can be walked on and, the maker claims, withstand 130 m.p.h. winds. Although made of resin, it gets a Class A rating when installed over existing Class A composite shingles or a Class A sub-roof system.
The closest Southern California installation is a private residence in La Jolla, where the owner wanted to keep the woodsy look of shakes but was barred by new fire codes from using anything other than a Class A roof.
