Check out this beautiful 24-gauge standing seam galvalume metal roof we installed for our customer in Lexington, South Carolina.
While more expensive on the front end, a standing seam (not exposed fastener, importantly) metal roofing system can actually cost you LESS MONEY than an asphalt shingle roof over the course of your homeownership. This is for a few reasons:
- THEY LAST LONGER: In South Carolina, especially towards the coastline, asphalt shingles are lasting homeowners, on average, 19 years. A good standing seam steel or aluminum roof easily lasts 50 years or more. So ask us to price out metal for you, along with shingles, and you might see that your metal roof option, spread over 50 years, means you are spending fewer dollars on roofing every year.
- THEY REQUIRE FAR LESS MAINTENANCE: We perform repairs on asphalt shingles every day in the greater Charleston/Lowcountry area, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned in performing all of that work, it’s that shingle roofs are far more susceptible to leaking without the homeowner’s constant attention to a proper maintenance schedule. This is because there are many more points of vulnerability on a shingle roof than a properly-installed metal roof. Even when you maintain asphalt roofs, they will lose granules each year and eventually become too brittle to maintain. On the other hand, standing seam roofs do not degrade in the elements; animals can’t chew through them, and all of the fasteners and penetrations are hidden underneath the panels where water can never access them.
- LOWER INSURANCE COSTS: One of the coolest components of a properly-installed standing seam metal roof is the fact that we use High-Temp Ice & Water Shield as the underlayment for the entire roof; this component goes on underneath the metal and effectively waterproofs your entire home so that, if a major hurricane were to hit and your roof covering was to fail somehow, rain wouldn’t be able to flood the inside of your house from the top down. And who likes this almost as much as we do? As a “Secondary Water Resistance” capability on a roof, your insurance carrier results in lower risk for them and a lower annual premium for you.
Why Residential Metal Roofing is Worth it in the End
The number 1 deterrent people have is how much metal roofs cost. And cost is a significant consideration for all of us, so I’m not diminishing that. But if we are open to analyzing our actual cost of owning a roof beyond Year 1, we might see more of these beautiful and high-performing roofs across the Lowcountry soon enough!
