Metal Roofing in Kansas City

People say metal roof and mean one of two things. The first is standing seam: flat pans, usually 16 to 18 inches wide, joined by a raised seam that is either snapped together or mechanically crimped. No fastener passes through the water plane. The pans sit on concealed clips that let the metal slide as it heats and cools.

The second is exposed-fastener panel, the ribbed sheet most people picture on a barn or a shop. Screws with neoprene washers go through the face of the panel into purlins or decking. It costs meaningfully less installed, and it works, but every screw is a hole in the roof that depends on a rubber washer staying compressed.

That is the whole tradeoff. Standing seam moves without asking anything of a gasket. Exposed fastener asks a few hundred gaskets to hold, and those gaskets have a service life. On an outbuilding that is a reasonable trade. On a house you plan to keep, it usually is not.

A long steel pan on a hot Kansas City afternoon is measurably longer than the same pan in January. Standing seam is designed around that. The clips float, the panel is fastened at one point, and the eave is hemmed rather than pinned so the pan can grow toward the gutter and shrink back.

Face-nail a standing seam pan at both ends and the metal has nowhere to go. It buckles, the seam works itself loose, and the fastener holes elongate until they weep. We have pulled panels off six-year-old installs where every failure traced back to somebody screwing the pan down solid at the ridge and the eave both.

Oil canning is the other thing worth knowing before you buy. It is the slight waviness you see reflected in a flat metal pan, and it is a characteristic of flat sheet steel, not a defect. Heavier gauge reduces it. Striations or a pencil rib in the pan reduce it more. Nobody can promise it away, and a salesman who does is guessing.

Low-slope porch roofs, shed dormers and additions are where we install the most metal on otherwise-shingled houses. Below about a 3-in-12 pitch, asphalt shingle is being asked to do something it was never rated for, and those sections are where the leaks keep coming back no matter how many times they get patched.

Long, uninterrupted slopes suit metal too, because there is less trim, fewer terminations and fewer places for water to be redirected. The opposite is also true: a roof chopped up by six dormers, three valleys and a chimney is expensive in metal, because almost all of the labor and nearly all of the risk lives in the flashing details, not the field.

Then there is the hail conversation, and it needs to be honest. Steel dents. A metal roof will take a hailstorm and keep shedding water when a comparable asphalt roof would need replacing, but you may be able to see the dimples from the driveway. Some owners do not care because the roof still works. Some care a great deal. We would rather you know that in the driveway than after the storm.

Metal goes over a sound deck, and the deck has to be flat. Every dip and every high spot in old plank sheathing shows through a flat pan far more than it shows through shingle. Where we find waviness, the honest fix is new sheathing over the planks, and that goes in the scope with a price on it before anyone starts.

Underlayment for metal is a different product than the synthetic we run under shingle. Under metal it gets hot, so it needs to be a high-temperature membrane, and it needs to be one rated for direct metal contact. Cheap felt under a steel roof degrades into powder and takes the secondary water barrier with it.

Dissimilar metals are the quiet one. Copper against galvanized steel, or bare steel fasteners in an aluminum panel, sets up corrosion at the contact point. That includes gutter, drip edge, snow retention and every screw. Matching the metals through the whole assembly is basic, and it is one of the first things we check on a metal roof somebody else installed.

Metal is quoted by system, gauge and trim, not by a per-square number pulled off a rate sheet. The estimate names the panel profile and width, the steel gauge, the coating, the clip type and spacing, the underlayment, and every piece of flashing and closure by location. Ridge, hip, valley, sidewall, endwall, eave, rake, pipe penetration.

It also states what happens at the gutter, because a metal roof sheds faster than a shingle roof and dumps water in a more concentrated line. Sometimes the existing gutter handles that. Sometimes it needs a larger trough or another downspout, and that belongs in the number up front.

If we walk your roof and think metal is not the right spend for your house, we will say that too, and price the shingle option next to it so you can see both. We tell people their roof is fine when it is fine, and we tell them shingle is the better buy when it is.