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Most standing-seam metal roofs, when designed and installed correctly, are high quality long-lasting systems.  Also, correctly installed standing seam roofs need very little maintenance.  However, when there are shortcomings in design or installation, leaky metal roofs may never work right because they often cost more to correct the underlying deficiency than the original installation (coatings fail because they do not correct the underlying deficiency).  Most serious problems come from lack of design accommodations for expansion/contraction or installer error in fastener placement that restrict expansion/contraction movement.  Another common error is the use of flat overlap seams that depend on close fastener spacing to compress caulking sealants to stay watertight (hint, if surface applied caulking, sealant, or coating has been applied to metal lap joints in standing seam systems, the joint was not designed or installed correctly).  ConSpecT has performed hundreds of metal roof forensic investigations to learn what works and what doesn’t.

 

Other Metal Roof Types:

Through Fastened metal roofs (long metal panels with exposed fastener heads, commonly called R-panels) are very economical when first installed but tend to leak in 10 years or so.  Worn out fastener gaskets can sometimes be replaced with oversized fasteners to mitigate the leaks for a while.  Also, there are some coating systems that can put the roof back in the dry for several years, but buyer beware, most coatings are not much more than paint or aluminized asphalt that have a very short effective life-cycle resulting in poor ROI.  To be effective coating material must be resilient and nearly always need to be reinforced at all points where expansion/contraction movement and at fastener heads.

 

Hand crafted sheet metal panels of lead, copper, zinc, and iron have been around since biblical times.  Later shop fabricated steel roofs and corrugated metal roofs (aka Tin Roofs) proliferated all around the world.  Hand crafted and shop fabricated sheet metal panels are still used, especially when unusual shapes and transitional areas around obstructions make factory panel systems less feasible.  ConSpecT has specified hand crafted flat seam copper sheets soldered together to solve many difficult roof transitions on various types of long-term steep roof systems; (see example below).