Types of Roofs for Your Home

When thinking about the type of roof for your home, there’s three main areas to consider: appearance, local climate, and budget.

Here’s a mini crash course on the basics of different roofing options.

There are three types of roofing we install most frequently: surface mounted metal, standing seam metal and asphalt shingles. Each category has a few styles and options to consider.

Metal

In terms of appearance, the two metal options have a similar look and similar colour options.

One thing to consider with metal roofs is that they can be quite noisy compared to asphalt. Raindrops and wind can cause slight vibration – but that might be a cozy sound to you!

Also, depending on the overall size and pitch of the roof, metal roofs can sometimes make rain and snow management tricky. Gutters need to be dropped slightly on a metal roof compared to asphalt, since they’re prone to large snow build up sliding off. If the gutter is at a normal placement, this can potentially tear the gutter off the house – which we don’t want! So, if there’s a rain storm with a lot surface water running down the roof, it can often jump over the lowered gutter, even if everything is working as intended.

Standing seam metal uses hidden fasteners and mechanical seams to prevent water infiltration and has no maintenance expectation for the life of the product – a big bonus!

Surface mounted metal relies on gaskets, sealants and foam to prevent water infiltrations. These aspects of the roof are known to fail much sooner than the life expectancy of the metal. Because of this, we try to steer people towards standing seam or asphalt shingles for more complicated roofs, and use surface mounted metal for more simple, easy to maintain roofs without valleys.

Asphalt Shingles

A good chunk of the roofs we do are simple asphalt shingles.

Shingles are a very cost effective and option, with relatively few drawbacks. There’s also a wide variety of colour and design options, making asphalt shingles a very popular choice!

Cost

When comparing the cost of these different roof types, we can use asphalt as the base price. Surface mounted metal will add 2-3% to the total cost of the home, compared to asphalt, and standing seam will add roughly 9%.