Concrete tiles can be wonderful roofing materials for your home. Once installed, it’s virtually maintenance-free and provides wonderful insulation for your home. Concrete tile roofs are fire, rot and insect resistant. The color choices aren’t as plentiful as asphalt or formed resin, but the look and feel it can give to your home is unique and full of character.
While this product is awesome and can last a lifetime, there are some issues that can make it seem less desirable. This will depend on how your home was built and the climate. Concrete tiles are a very heavy material, weighing roughly 9 lbs/sqft.; as compared to asphalt shingles at 2 lbs/sqft or formed resin at about 3 lbs/sqft. If you take your average size home which needs approximately 30 squares of roofing materials and multiply this by 9 lbs, you end up with a roof weighing around 27,000 lbs – that’s equivalent to 4 Ford F-150 pick-up trucks!
This added weight requires an engineer to spec out your attic and your contractors to build a support system strong enough to hold the weight of this roof. Once installed, these roofs look fantastic, but prepare for a more involved and expensive installation process.
Concrete tile roofs are not considered Impact Resistant (IR) and do tend to crack during severe hail storms or if walked on improperly. In this case, individual tiles can be replaced, but there could be a color difference because of fading over time. Be sure when you or other contractors are walking on your roof to paint, clean gutters, put up Christmas lights, or retrieve a baseball, that you follow the manufacturer’s instructions so that tiles aren’t broken.
We offer our homeowners the following brand of concrete tile roofs: