A roof over your head

I knew it was likely, but the first roofing contractor confirmed it.

“The roof is shot and needs to be completely replaced.”  His matter of fact tone and manner, derived from years of roof installations and repairs, presented his diagnosis without ambiguity, and left no hope for a lesser remedy.

“And your chimney is crumbling too.  It’s only the membrane holding it together.  You’re gonna need that fixed, but we don’t do that type of work.”  He delivered it in a kind way, trying to avoid insult after injury.

I was prepared for this, and in fact had negotiated down the price of the house to account for it.  I had also realized that a good roof was a pre-requisite to my plans for installing solar collectors.  One does not want to de-install a solar array in order to replace a roof shortly after.  Do it before.  So the roof (and chimney) goes to the top of the list.

Common knowledge is that flat roofs will always leak, but the research I’ve done is not as clear.  All roofs will eventually leak.  And nearly all commercial buildings have flat roofs.  They can’t be all bad.

There are numerous options for flat roofs.  And there are design issues for insulation, energy efficiency, sustainable materials, and so on.  There are currently debates over the choice of “cool roof” versus “green roof” (also called “live roofs”), and the merits of white vinyl versus black rubber membranes regarding their ecological and health impacts.

The green materials issue compares vinyl, containing PVCs, with synthetic rubber, Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer, EPDM.  These both sound pretty unnatural and ungreen to me, but EPDM turns out to be stable and safe stuff compared to the health impacts from PVC.

The energy issues can be explored with an online calculator from the Department of Energy.  With the help of some additional references, I determined that for our location on the planet, there is not much difference in total energy use.  There are 8000 heating-degree-days in a year here, but only 630 cooling-degree-days.  The black roof gain in the winter matches the white roof benefit in the summer; it is essentially a wash.

Having decided on the technology, how to select an installer?  I found three high-rated roofers from Angie’s List, and invited them to give me estimates.  The first arrived in the morning, unloaded his ladder, and within a few minutes was back with the verdict presented above.

The second showed up, but his ladder was not tall enough (and there is no internal access to the roof, something I intend to change).  He said he would return later with his flat roof installer (I thought he was the roofer) to get a proper estimate.  I haven’t heard back, which is probably ok, since not having a tall enough ladder seems like a red flag for selecting roofers.

The third claims to have visited the house in my subsequent phone calls with him, but has not provided an estimate.  Maybe I dropped the ball somewhere, but I’m tending toward that first straight-talking roofer who followed up with an estimate in line with my expectation– just under $10k.

Now I can move on to figure out what to do about that chimney…