We'll lay down the adhesive, the Styro and caulk it. Either we'll paint
that or simply undercoat the fiberglass corrugated sheets--maybe both.
The fiberglass sheets will be pre-drilled for the screws, and we'll use
the neoprene washers. Finally, although we might fully trust that the
screws through the Styro would be self-sealing--for peace of mind, we'll
dip every screw in silicone just to be on the safe side.

Any objections? If so, I want to hear them before I wind up sitting up
there drenched to the drawers under that roof with nothing to show for it
but a cold shower and a bunch of Mint Green paint chips offering a fine
contrast to a cherry red face so wet that you could not tell the
teardrops from the rain.

Over time, UV light deteriorates foams. Virtually every foam on the
market will be destroyed by the sun over time. What you're wanting to do
is a BAD idea.

One of the reasons why we do what we do is (get ready for this): It works
and is cheap.

We gravitate towards the least cost / effort solution.

The market is funny that way. Your suggested solution would probably be
fine for a couple of years, then the whole roof will turn to mush and
you'll be up there again.

If you're looking to do something different, then go with a highly
reflective metal roof.

Don can post something up, as he's recently had experience.

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The material you're searching for is galvanized, ribbed metal roofing.
Also, the styrofoam underlayment should be designed specifically for a roof
application.

I got my roofing material at Menards and myself and 1 other person installed
1000 sf in 2 days and that included the continuous ridge vent.
It performed very well during the winter as snow and ice had a tough time
adhering to it, hope it will continue to do so as it ages.
During the summer the highly reflective properties of this particular color,
silver, appears to *bounce* the heat back from where it came from.

These are the benefits:
Inexpensive, roughly $650 for 1000 sf
Easy installation, 2 people - 2 days
Longevity, warranteed for 30 years
Form, depending on the atmosphere, it appears white, blue, silver.
Easy to clean, just spray it off with the hose.
Energy efficient, seems to tame the sun and ice, and levels the interior
temps.

All in all I am very pleased with the product and can highly recommend it.

FWIW: Over the weekend I became familiar first hand with a new roofing
product for flat deck roofs which I installed in about 2 hours this past
Friday on the 2nd floor deck I am building.

Its a roll roofing product, about half as thin as a 3 tab shingle, made out
of pure tar, with a thin plastic type of film on the outside, and its paper
backed.
A little terrifying to install, what with its enormous stickiness, but
pretty easy once you get the hang of it.
I installed about 300 sf and can't make a real good evaluation on it at this
time as I have not see its performance over time.
Being crystal white in appearance it would seem that it has tremendous
reflective properties.
I bought this product at Menards, comes in 3' wide x 33' long rolls and
costs about $80 per roll.
I'll be interested in seeing how this stuff performs after a couple more
weeks of intense sun and then again when its covered in ice in about 6
months.

A downside will be if the product fails and needs to be repaired.
There is no getting it back off due to its stickiness.
If that time comes I will have to apply something else right over top of it,
or at worst, rip the 3/4" T&G plywood up and replace the whole thing, and I
really don't even want to consider such a thing.

Cool post BTW.

Any Q's, just ask.




"Mac the Nice" <mac_the_nice@bigstring.com> wrote in message
news:46bcd6f5$0$18212$88260bb3@news.atlantisnews.com...

Two weeks ago, the LP tank in the RV suddenly dropped to empty and we were
out of hot water for our evening showers. The thought of burning up at
least twenty bucks (at 6 mpg) in gasoline plus three or four working hours
out of the day for that drive down the mountain caused me to think again
about how maybe we could put that trip off for a few days by a resort to
some sort of primitive technology closer at hand. When the sight of a pair
of five gallon buckets, one white, the other black came to my eye out
there under that sun, I figured that maybe we were suddenly, and for a
first time most fortunately in the gas-free hot-water business. After
filling with water from the well, I set them both out in direct sunlight
to stand all day while we went back to work getting those rotten old
shingles off the roof of the 1,200 sq. ft. log home we bought and are in
process of restoring to a livable condition.

Long about midday, upon my first check of the water temperature in those
buckets, I found that science was not to be insulted in one of its most
basic principles of physics concerning heat absorption and light
reflectivity, in what would be otherwise known as the LRV or *light
reflectivity value* when it comes to a variance of temperature pertaining
to color.

The water in the black bucket was already risen to a comfortable bath
temperature, whereas in the white bucket, the water was still cool to the
touch. There are few things more satisfying in life than to see theory
substantiated by experiment in fact and reality. I almost got a kind of
'rush' out of it, as they say in the crack house or out on the Rainbow
Family Farm, or on the Merry-Go-Round at the State Fair--and I continued
to get off on it, as they say, the rest of that day as I slaved on under
the hot sun scraping those black shingles off the roof.

This remarkable contrast between the black bucket water and the white had
me thinking long and deep (and not a little angrily) about what was
striking me more and more as the abjectly stubborn stupidity of roofing a
building with a color of material that turns out to be lowest of all on
the LRV scale, where white is 86.64 and black is 4.16!

"What manner of foolishness is this?" I had to wonder, as I went on hoeing
those nasty, smelly black tiles off the roof and pushing them over the
edge of the eaves on to a clear plastic sheet I had laid out over the
grass below--such a horrible mistake as that, by the end of the day, would
turn out to be. When we took up the sheet to empty all the detritus of
asphalt and black roofing granules, we found that the lawn beneath had
been burned to a beautiful shade of light, golden brown.

"What manner of lunacy is this?" I gasped, staring aghast not so much at
the fried grass as at the reality of what the sheathing on most people's
roof-tops is being subjected to, in terms of heat deterioration, every day
the sun is up there beating down on it.

I decided to try an experiment, now that I had seen first hand, with the
closest thing to come to hand--just a couple of five gallon buckets--that
my physics teachers hadn't just been whistling "Afternoon Delight", as to
what might happen if someone were to be confident enough in these
principles as to actually break with some old dirty roofing habits and try
a new thing.

Just for the fun of it, I took a one foot square of Dow-Corning 3/4" sky
blue Styrofoam panel and nailed it down to the now bare plywood surface of
the roof, and left it there. Now of course you can read up on all the
dope of do's and don'ts from Dow itself as to the specifications for this
material when it is used precisely to this purpose of roof insulation . .
.

http://files.buildsite.com/dbderived-f/dowchemical/derived_files/derived7344.pdf

Clearly, what I had in mind was not unprecedented--for insulation. So, you
can imagine the sense of satisfaction that came with the result of this
experiment, to find by the touch of a hand, the contrast in heat between
the light brown surface of the bare plywood, and that of the light blue
Styrofoam. It was totally, "Wow!" The plywood was hot to the touch while
the Styro was cool by comparison, just perhaps around air temperature or
that of a lukewarm bath.

Then, just to be on the safe side of a greater certainty, I decided to
leave that square of Styro up there under full sun, through peak daytime
temps of +92 degrees for two more days. Yesterday morning, as I climbed
down the ladder from the roof, just before taking off for our house in
town, I was happy to jump behind the wheel in the Blazer and announce to
my Baby that there had been absolutely no visible deterioration to the
Styro--none whatsoever.

I have long been a firm believer in the proposition that modern mankind
gets stuck, more often than not in stubborn old habits that we get
mistaken for the 'state of the art'. We keep using heavy, expensive,
smelly old materials from a bygone era that technology has since made
obsolete--if only we could know that by suddenly recognizing the new
material and method that is here to replace the old.

Here is the idea . . .

You are hardly going to find a membrane less permeable to moisture than
Styrofoam--whether by direct penetration or osmosis. The stuff is just
flat out water-tight, as I have been able to observe, once again by
experiment, putting water over its surface and waiting long hours to see
if any gets through. None does.

But Styrofoam is soft and highly subject to damage by whatever might come
flying through the air to impact, hail, sticks, bird-beaks and claws, name
your favorite fine-feathered or furry varmint. Because of that, Styro
must be covered by something to protect its highly vulnerable surface.
Before taking consideration of the various materials available to that
purpose, whether old-fashioned or new, one thing to be kept in mind is
that the Styro can be caulked along its every edge, peak and valley, to
make of the entire roof one water-impermeable surface. Now that is the
roof, and all it needs is something to shield it which need not even be
water-tight.

In a manner of speaking it almost doesn't matter what you put over the
Styro for a shell so long as it does not defeat the other primary purpose
aside from shedding water, that of reflecting heat. This being said, a
person will want to find something that the birds and squirrels won't eat.
So, you don't opt for shingles of beef jerky. Rather, you go to Lowe's or
Home Depot to see what modern technology hath wrought--or maybe to the
Internet.

There was a fine study done in Florida on the feasibility of working with
something developed by NASA for the Space Shuttle in the form of the
"elastomeric" ceramic micro-sphere technology--as a paint additive.

http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/publications/html/FSEC-PF-293-95/index.htm

Such products e.g. "Kool Seal" are on the market already mixed, and the
LRV of the white, rubberized coating, for the first year or so before
dirt, mildew and staining had a chance at it, was high enough to result in
so much as a 60% reduction in air conditioning costs--according to that
study backed by some pretty fancy looking science.

But as some people have cause to complain about the eye-strain impact of a
bright roof, a few communities as e.g. in Arizona have outlawed the
stuff--and I don't know that I blame them--as I think about that red metal
roof lately installed across the street from my house in town, the way
that sucker reflects heat and light. While storm clouds are rising, I
have been known, a time or two, to get out on the lawn for a few quick
rain dance Boogaloo steps, in conjuration of a thunderstorm with golf-ball
or better sized hail, just to serve that neighbor right. And, upon wishing
not to be like that tin-roof lodger over there, I have had much thought
toward a better, kinder more neighborly idea.

There is a fairly informative article entitled "Paint it Green" on the
"green technology" of LRV factors and that NASA micro-sphere technology
when it comes to such an additive in the various colors and shades of
paint . . .

http://www.metrosantacruz.com/metro-santa-cruz/04.25.07/green-paint-0717.html

And you can access a list giving the precise value for nearly every color
and shade in the rainbow . . .

http://www.apcosigns.com/techpdf/lrv.pdf

What led me to that Santa Cruz site was a search on the keywords "green"
and "LRV", going on the hunch that the color green, in its lighter shades
might prove to have a higher LRV than most any other. The above-linked
list bears the hunch true, as it turns out that e.g. "Mint Green" is
higher on the scale even than the lightest shade of yellow.

Well! it only stands to reason that trees and most all plant life with the
kind of sun exposure they get, would evolve with a color scheme for their
foliage which would be least susceptible to burning from UV sunlight
radiation. Most plants do not have blue leaves, so I figure that we should
not have a blue roof, but a Mint Green one for that log cabin.

Here's the plan . . .

We invest in some of that unpigmented translucent fiber-glass corrugated
roof sheeting to serve as the shell over the Styro and we paint the Styro
the color we like, namely Mint Green--and maybe we'll even go so far as to
paint the underside of the shell Mint Green, too. As shown by the list . .
.

http://www.apcosigns.com/techpdf/lrv.pdf

. . . of all colors, short of the various shades of white, Mint Green is
highest on the LRV scale at 75.80, higher than Sky Blue at 65.80 (no
wonder the Styro was so cool to the touch out in that sun), the Satin
Silver at 52, the Chrome Yellow at 42, and the Buff at 53.40.

Back to the Styro: Two more advantages are these: since it is soft and
compressible like a sponge, you can buy the 'ship-lap' sheets, fit them
together with no necessity of allowing for contraction and expansion as
with all other forms of sheathing. And yet, so spongy as that stuff may
seem, as the weight of anything put down over it gets distributed, it is
remarkably capable of sustaining its depth without being depressed even to
the extent that we were able to underlay the air-conditioners on the roof
of our RV (to stop leaks) with Styro sheets at the beginning of this
season with as yet, no visible change in 3/4" depth of the material. You
can crawl on it with your knees (while cutting) or even walk on
it--carefully--with minimal effect to the surface.

The stuff holds up, and due to this virtue, our plan continues as follows
. . .

We'll lay down the adhesive, the Styro and caulk it. Either we'll paint
that or simply undercoat the fiberglass corrugated sheets--maybe both. The
fiberglass sheets will be pre-drilled for the screws, and we'll use the
neoprene washers. Finally, although we might fully trust that the screws
through the Styro would be self-sealing--for peace of mind, we'll dip
every screw in silicone just to be on the safe side.

Any objections? If so, I want to hear them before I wind up sitting up
there drenched to the drawers under that roof with nothing to show for it
but a cold shower and a bunch of Mint Green paint chips offering a fine
contrast to a cherry red face so wet that you could not tell the teardrops
from the rain.
--
Mackie
http://whosenose.blogspot.com
http://doo-dads.blogspot.com/
http://www.mackiemesser.zoomshare.com/0.html
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/


--

.............................................................

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