Points and Beauty for Roof Tiles in a LEED Home

Building a green home takes a lot of effort and determining just what products meet the standards of being environmentally preferable and also helping us get LEED-H points is not always easy.  Roofing was one of those products.  We needed a product that would meet all of the energy efficiency requirements of the home but also had to be rated Class 4 for impact resistance, have the highest ratings for straight line wind testing at 110 mph and have a Class A fire retardance rating.

 

Most people start the roofing process by looking at asphalt shingles; there is nothing environmentally friendly about a product that uses petroleum, has a 20 year life span at best by the ocean, and cannot be recycled. Asphalt was out and we honed in on metal and composite roofing. I really liked the look of metal roofing but was unsure it was the right rood for our Oceanside, New England cottage style home. The summer cottages of RI usually have either cedar shingles (a look I didn’t want) or natural slate (a look I wanted but could neither afford nor was very eco-friendly). We did our homework and at GreenBuild we saw the composite slate tiles; it was love at first site.

 

We selected the DaVinci EcoBlend roofing tiles in a beautiful Weathered Gray color. They are perfect for our home. The products have been rated by the Cool Roof Rating Council (CRRC) to reflect sunlight and heat away from the home. Meeting the initial qualifications for a Cool Roof indicates that DaVinci EcoBlend products meet or exceed initial ENERGY STAR® program requirements for 25 percent solar reflectivity (in  LEED-NC this would get you up to 2 points for the  7.2 Heat Island Effect). We have our first walk through for our ENERGY STAR portion of our LEED testing the week of May 4^th, we have selected to go the performance route as opposed to prescriptive path for ENERGY STAR and expect the roof to contribute to our E&A score based on the shingles solar reflectance and thermal emittance.

 

A Cool Roof is measured by two properties, solar reflectance and thermal emittance. Both properties are measured from 0 to 1. The higher the value, the cooler the roof. During independent testing, DaVinci EcoBlends measured in a range of 0.26 to 0.34 for solar reflectance and in the range of 0.67 to 0.72 for thermal emittance. Depending on our home’s overall performance in the ENERGY STAR blower test and the efficiency of our spray foam insulation, the roof tiles can only add to our overall performance. We are insulating the entire roof deck to an R-51 (toasty or cool depending on the season) and DaVinci will maximize our roof’s performance.

 

The installation team from Cape Cod Roofing in Wareham, MA, has been installing the DaVinci roof and their work will be tested and measured as well.

 

The tiles have a 70 plus year lifespan and can be 100% recycled at end of their lifecycle. This is and will be the only roof we put on this house.

The house is so close to being buttoned up and you can really see the vision of our design and all our effort. We’re also really starting to see all of the beauty that the roof design and the perfect roof tiles are adding to the house.

posted by KDL | follow me on Twitter: newscaster