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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

> The only reason I can think of that houses don’t usually have metal roofs is because they cost at least double, if not triple

Also noise, if you live somewhere with a lot of rain.

I wonder if the longevity argument really holds, too. Anecdotally, our local public housing project invested in metal roofs many years ago (less than 30, however) but a good fraction of them have been replaced since with contemporary asphalt shingles. I do not know why they failed, but the switch back to asphalt says something.

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FWIW a bunch of friends of ours live in a development with metal roofs (built late 1970s) and they said it's been great. It just works, no leaks, no repairs necessary.

There's probably a bit of selection bias in both directions: metal roofs that don't work get replaced with shingles and are no longer metal roofs, while metal roofs that do work have owners that don't think about them much and don't complain about them.

To me it says that someone in the housing authority fell for a sales pitch on metal roofs. "Buy it once and never have to pay for a roof again." That person is now probably long gone, as is the salesman and likely the roofing contractor who installed it. The roof is now leaking, and the current administration looked at what they could afford and asphalt it is.

I agree. The sales pitch on metal roofs is that they last twice as long as shingles, but the reality has not matched that promise. If I were replacing a leaking metal roof that cost me twice what a shingle roof would have cost, and it has been less than 30 years, I would be a fool to buy another metal roof to replace it.

> That person is now probably long gone, as is the salesman and likely the roofing contractor who installed it.

AKA "I'll be gone. You'll be gone."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/IBG_YBG

I didn't mean to imply that there was some kind of collusion going on, but that sort of thing certainly happens too.

Metal roofs for SFHs are mostly beneficial in wildland / forest areas where there are wildfires. Shingles will burn (they're made of petroleum products), while a metal roof will resist far far far longer. However this only makes sense if the rest of the structure is also just as fire resistant.

Metal roofs will also last a lot longer. Their color may not, but the roof itself, as long as it was installed properly (major component here), will outlast asphalt by decades.

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