I was dead set on asphalt shingles until I saw a neighbor's metal roof after 5 years

My neighbor Jim put a metal roof on his shed back in 2019 and it still looks brand new. No curling edges, no granule loss, no nothing. Meanwhile my buddy's asphalt roof from the same year is already starting to peel up on the south side. That really made me rethink my whole plan. I was worried metal would be too loud in rain but Jim said he put down closed cell foam under it and you can barely hear a thing. Anyone else make the switch from asphalt to metal and regret it or love it?

2 comments

2 Comments

blair_lewis852d ago

The thing nobody brings up is how metal roofs handle snow better than asphalt if you live somewhere with real winters. Asphalt gets those ice dams that wreck the edges, but metal just sheds it all off clean. Plus the closed cell foam trick for noise works way better than people think, so that worry is overblown.

samward2d ago

I actually watched a video from some roofer in Minnesota who tested this with a snow load simulator. He showed that metal roofs have a steeper pitch angle standard (like 6:12 or more) compared to a lot of asphalt roofs that are flatter, so the snow really does slide off way faster. That ice dam thing is no joke either, I saw him pour hot water on an asphalt shingle edge and it just pooled up and froze again, while the metal panel had that slippery coating (the Galvalume stuff) and it ran right off. The noise thing is true though, I read on a building science forum that closed cell spray foam at like 2 inches thick drops the rain sound by something like 25 decibels. That's a huge difference for a pretty cheap fix compared to swapping out the whole roof deck.