Metal roofing

Standing seam panels join at raised, interlocking seams and attach to the deck through concealed clips hidden inside that seam. Nothing goes through the face of the panel. Exposed-fastener panels are simpler and cheaper: screws driven straight through the panel face into the deck below, each one sealed by a rubber washer under the screw head.

Exposed fastener shows up most on sheds, carports, and budget-driven builds where upfront cost is the whole decision. On a primary house roof, we install standing seam, for reasons that come down to exactly one thing: what eventually fails, and how many places it can fail from.

The rubber washer under an exposed-fastener screw is the weak point of the whole system, and it's a wear part in a place where nobody thinks to check it. Arizona UV hardens and cracks that gasket in years, not decades. Add in a panel that expands and contracts through tens of thousands of thermal cycles, and the screws work themselves slightly loose in the hole over time, so instead of one seam to worry about, you've got a few hundred individual puncture points, each one a potential leak on its own schedule.

Standing seam sidesteps this entirely because there's no exposed fastener anywhere on the roof to fail. The panel is never punctured; it's held from underneath, where the clip is UV-protected and isn't doing anything but sitting still.

Metal panels move. A Valley roof deck surface can swing 60–80°F or more between a summer afternoon and the pre-dawn low, and metal expands and contracts with every degree of that. Standing seam's concealed clips are engineered to let the panel float and slide slightly as it moves, instead of fighting it. The ticking or popping you sometimes hear around sunset or sunrise is that movement happening. Normal, and not a sign anything is wrong.

Exposed-fastener panels handle that same movement worse, because the screws hold the panel rigid at hundreds of fixed points instead of letting it float. That rigidity is exactly what drives the screws loose over years of cycling. The noise problem and the leak problem in the section above come from the same root cause.

Metal is the highest material cost of anything we install, and it's not close. Against that: a 40–70 year service life, versus 20–30 for shingle, with none of the periodic maintenance a foam roof needs. Per year of roof you actually own, it's often the cheapest material on this site. It's just the one that asks you to pay for those decades up front instead of a little at a time.

We reach for it specifically on low-slope additions and patio covers, where the other three materials run out of pitch to work with before metal does. Standing seam will go down to roughly a 1:12 slope. Shingle needs roughly 2:12 as an absolute floor, and even then only with doubled underlayment, well below the pitch most manufacturers will actually warranty. Tile needs more slope than that. That gap between 1:12 and where shingle or tile become workable is exactly why a low-slope addition or a patio cover ends up metal, regardless of what's on the main roof. We also reach for it on houses where cutting attic heat matters more than upfront cost, since a reflective metal roof gives back real cooling savings that the other three materials don't. What we won't do is sell it as the default. On a typical pitched Valley roof, tile or shingle do the job for meaningfully less money, and if the only reason you want metal is how it looks, we'll tell you that honestly before we quote it.