Are there any bad things about green roofs/living roofs?
September 3, 2010 by glg
Filed under Green Living FAQ
are there any bad things about green roofs?
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The house must be designed for it. The weight is enough to collapse the roof of a house that was not designed to bear it. There is also a limit to the pitch of the roof.
Hi,
I was looking at a TV show where a green roof was installed on a 6th floor roof of a building being converted to condo’s.
The roof has 6″ of soil put over the top of a single ply type of roof.
6″ of soil with water in it can reach 100 pounds per square foot, so that is a significant factor to this type of roof. This is 5 tons for 100 square feet. While this industrial building has a cement based roof, and the building is steel framed with cement columns, your house might be different.
It may still be possible to install a set of 4×4′s through the roof and then install some sort of raised roof beds, supported by those 4×4 structural members. You will need to contact a structural engineer for load calculations when you wish to add more than 1,000 pounds to your roof.
Even solar panels need load calculations. When it is windy, the solar panels can act like a wing, and can induce negative pressure to the roof members, pulling upwards on the building under some wind conditions, and pushing down on the building under other conditions, and pulling sideways too.
While the solar panels and their mounting system is less than 30 pounds per square foot, the wind loads can be even higher weights.
Best of luck to you.