What is the best flavor of ice cream? That’s sure to start a friendly disagreement. What is the best roofing material? Ah, another battle of words, no doubt. Your neighbor likes tile; your relatives live under shingle roofs. And yet, for most Arizona homeowners, one clear answer rings true: metal roofing.
Oh, Those Winds
Arizona is a gorgeous state. And yet it does have a bit of a wind problem, doesn’t it? When haboobs sweep across our majestic deserts, roofs pay the price. Shingle roofs erode quickly, and wind uplift can snatch whole strips of shingles off residential roofs in the blink of a (dust-bitten) eye.
What roofing material can possibly hold up against these biting, strong winds choked with sand and ready to tug weak roofs completely free of our homes?
Metal roofing can be firmly anchored to your home’s structural wood members with hurricane clips (nobody has yet renamed them monsoon clips, but they should). Standing seam panels, metal shakes, and metal slate roofing panels are fastened tightly to your roof with mechanical fasteners. Shingles are nailed down and can easily be ripped up in high winds.
Metal roofing has a tough paint finish topped by a thick clear coat, so it can resist the scouring effects of haboobs and the monsoon while maintaining its luster.
Rains
Monsoon storms can rise quickly, drop a lot of rain, and be so intense that flash flooding is a concern. What residential roofing material can handle that?
Metal roofing.
With metal roofs installed (typically) on battens that raise the metal slightly above your roof’s sheathing, the harsh battering of heavy rains is practically silent inside your home. Metal roofing can take the pounding, and a metal roof is durable and rugged if any hail falls. Shingles can get pelted with hail so badly that their water resistance vanishes.
Worried about rust? The tough paint and clear finish on metal roofing protects the metal for decades, so rust is never a concern.
Choices
Some Arizona homeowners worry their homes might look like warehouses if they have metal roofing installed. Not true! The choices in gleaming, new metal roofing are as bountiful as they are beautiful:
- Standing seam — Standing seam roof systems, the most common type of permanent metal roofing, are manufactured using a roll-forming machine and are finished with Kynar 500© paint; the individual panels combine with custom-formed eave edges, rake edges, ridge caps, z-bars, and other components; this results in a weather-tight, durable and beautiful roof that fully protects your home and all you hold precious inside it
- Stone-coated steel — Tough, sturdy steel can be formed to mimic shingles, shakes, Spanish tiles, Mediterranean tiles, or flat tiles; keep the traditional Southwestern look but enjoy the easy maintenance, weather resistance, and long life of a metal roof!
- Metal shake and slate — Our metal shake and slate four-way interlocking panels install directly to the roof deck and can give you either a solid color or variegated color, woodgrain, or stone finish
Time
Roofers consider two calendars when looking at residential roofs. One is the straightforward calendar, year after year. The other is the calendar created by weather and wear and tear. Your roof may have been installed 10 years ago, but it has actually worn like a 20-year-old roof.
Only metal roofing can stand the test of time. In Arizona, where scorching sun is followed by plunging nighttime temperatures, where the monsoon brings wind, rain, and heat all at once, metal roofing stands up better than shingles.
A 20-year-old metal roof is in its youth, with a good 30 years’ protection left. A 20-year-old shingle roof in Phoenix or Tucson is probably ready for tear-off and complete roof replacement.
Bank It
Metal roofing provides greater overall energy efficiency than even the coolest “cool roofing” shingles recognized by the federal Energy Star program. Metal roofing, able to reflect significant heat energy off your Phoenix or Tucson home’s roof, helps you save in many ways:
- Metal roofing reduces the workload on your HVAC system, shortening operating times and allowing your central air conditioner to turn on fewer times by day
- Metal roofing helps lengthen the life of your HVAC system
- Metal roofing helps lower repair and maintenance costs of your cooling system
- Metal roofing saves you the cost of two or three shingle roof installations since it typically lasts two to three times longer
We all want to keep Arizona beautiful. Environmentally, metal roofing makes good economic sense, since the embedded energy in the metal roof remains in place for up to five decades. Plus, metal roofing is 100 percent recyclable at the end of its life. Vertex Roofing provides complete metal roofing services for homeowners in the Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan areas. Contact us today to learn about metal slate-look roofing, metal shingles, stone-coated steel, and standing seam roofs.
