Flat Roof Heavy Snow

Unlike pitched roofs low slope buildings don t have the benefit of gravity working in their favor to remove precipitation off the surface.

Flat roof heavy snow.

Excessive rain heavy snow and built up ice all pose extra challenges for flat roofed homes. As standard practice places with heavy rainfall or snow storms will have higher roof pitches compared to places that experience less rain and snow. For safety reasons we recommend letting a professional remove snow from your roof for cases when a rake won t cut it. First figure out how deep the snow is piled up there.

Flat roofs can t possibly support all the extra weight a totally valid concern but rest assured your architect and engineer have this in mind when designing the roof structure. Flat roofs aren t architecturally logical as rain and snow will shed much more quickly off a sloped roof. The chief reason for having a roof pitch is to redirect water and snow away from the roof and avoid any percolation that might result from stagnation of water on the roof. If your roof is flat it is more likely to have snow load problems than if it is pitched.

You need to use a snow load formula for flat roofs. Snow is actually one of the easiest to design for and all. Wind seismic building weight furniture occupants etc. There are a few common misconceptions regarding flat roofs that are stubbornly persistent.

Another is that they cannot handle as much snow weight as pitched roofs because the snow sits directly on the roof. In this video i dispel 5 common myths surrounding the use of flat roofs in snowy climates. One of them is that flat roofs leak more easily than pitched ones. It also helps if the roof is in a sheltered area.

The snow settles on it evenly rather than being blown into large drifts which can cause a roof to fail. The easiest way is to push a yardstick into the snow on the roof selecting an area that looks typical of the overall snow depth. Yet for historic modern style buildings like this old house s cambridge tv project flat roofs are at the core of the architecture meant to reflect the broad horizontal lines of the natural landscape. So a risky roof is flat or slightly.

Certainly the weight of snow can add up but your home must support a variety of loads. Of course you don t need to live in a modern house to deal with a flat roof. The very notion of shelter is linked to the image of a roof above. Flat roofs are common with industrial buildings boasting wide roof spans and are also popular in dry climates for houses where there is no need for the roof to help disperse rain and snow.