According to various sources, including the National Insulation Association, up to 25% of a home’s heat can be lost through its roof if adequate insulation is not used. Not only is this bad for your wallet, it’s also terrible for your carbon footprint, so if your roof is leaking heat it’s doubly worth doing something about.

There are two main ways heat can escape through a roof:

Radiation

For most roofs, this is how the majority of heat is lost. Basically, heat wants to spread out as much as possible, so if you have a cold area next to a warm area, the heat will spread from the warm to the cold until both are the same temperature. This means if your loft space is warm and the air outside is cold, heat will move from inside to outside until the inside is just as cold as outside. Any roof will slow this process down a bit, as even standard roof tiles conduct heat less well than air so heat energy will move less quickly through them. However, to really slow this process down you need as thick a layer as possible of as poor a conducting material as you can get. This is exactly what insulation is, a really bad conductor of heat energy, so the more insulating material you can pack into your roof, the slower heat will escape and the less you will lose.

Convection

The other way roofs lose heat is when warm air flows out of the roof space through gaps and cracks. This can be between lose roof tiles, through gaps in the eaves or, quite commonly, in spaces where the roof tiles meet the top of the walls underneath. What happens is that the difference in the temperature between the warm air inside the roof and the colder air outside causes air currents to form due to the air inside having more energy than the air outside. The warm, energetic air escapes and colder air moves in from outside to replace it. Again, this means you are constantly losing heat which can only be remedied by sealing up all the gaps and crack you can find to reduce the amount of heat lost.

How Metrotile can help you

Metrotile roofing can help you address both of these issues in two different ways. Firstly, our coated steel roof tiles are thinner than those used in many conventional roofs, giving you extra space to pack in even more insulation to reduce heat loss through radiation. Secondly, because our tiles are larger than most traditional tiles, there are fewer joins, reducing the number of potential gaps through which heat can escape via convection. The unique, high quality fixings we use also ensure that our tiles fit together much more tightly than most other roofing systems, making it even harder for warm air to escape.

These two factors combined mean a Metrotile tile roof can be much more thermally efficient than your existing roof, giving you the potential to save money and the environment.

To find out more about upgrading your roof to Metrotile, call us today on 01249 658514 or fill out our online contact form and we will get back to you as soon as possible.