Flat Roof Heavy Snow

First figure out how deep the snow is piled up there.

Flat roof heavy snow.

If your roof is flat it is more likely to have snow load problems than if it is pitched. Certainly the weight of snow can add up but your home must support a variety of loads. One of them is that flat roofs leak more easily than pitched ones. You need to use a snow load formula for flat roofs.

This is especially critical if you have a flat roof that requires shoveling or heavy snowfall that needs a snowblower. Even in these arid regions so called flat roofs are still installed with a slight pitch to keep water from pooling on top of the structure. 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. 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.

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. 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. So a risky roof is flat or slightly. Call in the professionals to remove snow from your roof.

Unlike pitched roofs low slope buildings don t have the benefit of gravity working in their favor to remove precipitation off the surface. 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. It also helps if the roof is in a sheltered area.

The very notion of shelter is linked to the image of a roof above. 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. Wind seismic building weight furniture occupants etc. Snow is actually one of the easiest to design for and all.

Another is that they cannot handle as much snow weight as pitched roofs because the snow sits directly on the roof. Of course you don t need to live in a modern house to deal with a flat roof. Excessive rain heavy snow and built up ice all pose extra challenges for flat roofed homes. Flat roofs aren t architecturally logical as rain and snow will shed much more quickly off a sloped roof.