We have an adjoining barn which we have knocked through and extended our house. The conversion was modular within the barn. The barn roof is asbestos which must have been done just before it was banned as it is in very good condition. As the conversion is within the barn and does not touch the roof we did not bother replacing the asbestos as it had good insulating qualities and maintenance free. and if you don’t touch it it won’t harm you. We are now selling the house and of course the barn roof is becoming a problem for prospective buyers. I was thinking of replacing it with steel sheets. Has anybody done a roof with steel sheets? If so what would they recommend ?
Before you do anything, check you can change the material it was constructed with, there are strict laws about changing outlooks and materials and the Mairie is the place to ask plus make sure you get it in writing for future reference as maires come and go.
That’ll be lovely in the 40°+ summers we can expect.
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The query is misleading ..and should be about asbestos .That is your real problem, not the steel roof. Any diagnostician doing the mandatory survey before the property goes on the market has to point that out.
The first point is can you confirm it actually is Asbestos ..the Diagnostician will assume it is but there are types of Fibro cement which do not contain it. You might need a laboratory to prove this
And if it is Asbestos to decide whether you can get rid of it cheaper than the potential purchaser. You can sell a property with asbestos in it , but not without making it clear that it is present.
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Yes it is asbestos and I am looking for the cheapest way of replacing it
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Asbestos removal has to be done by a special firm wearing protective clothing, masks etc and only they can dispose of it where it is designated. I remember this from being on the municipal council and the village school had asbestos floor tiles that had to be removed to make the new cantine and the cost ran into thousands, you might want to get quotes for all that.
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I know all about asbestos and how to deal with it. What I want to know is has any body put a steel roof on their house and what type did they use etc
I’ve got a steel roof on my old barn, it’s corrugated tôle. I didn’t put it on, but repaired it and retrofitted 2 new Douglas A frames under the existing sw purlins near the existing wormy oak frames. The roof structure is very simple. Easy to clip zinc guttering to the steel with the trad. brackets on the projecting eaves. A conventional span between frames of up to 3m would seem ok, you would be working to the sheet widths incl overlap and space your frames and purlins accordingly. Pitch on mine is about 48 degrees and span around 6m from memory. Stone gables, oversailing tôle, purlins straight through. I’ve no idea of French regs on these roofs. I’d get a couvreur to give me the structure specs prior to him fitting the tins, or get an all-in price.
Latterly we replaced a pitched steel roof on a long chalet in Sark. We used the blue Profil sheet with integrated insulation. Again, I didn’t fit that, contractors on Sark did it. The new insulated roof works well. You just look up the tech details from the manufacturers for spans, pitches etc.
We have built a steel shed for our big Perkins 6354 generator. The building was sized to match easily available galvanised tôle. Light timber roof trusses were made at fairly close centres and the tins screwed to them. Trusses fixed to wallplates with truss clips.
Not really my cup of tea cutting tin, I got tinnitus (pun not intended!) from just one exposure to someone near me in a workshop cutting aluminium on a table saw about 35 years ago…ouch. They are good roofs but get very hot or cold, so thinking out how insulation will help is essential.
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It’s no worse than anything else, as long as it’s well insulated. It’s inexpensive, lightweight, and more resistant to rain and storms than roof tiles. 
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It the condensation you have to be aware of as well
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That’s very true. We put a steel roof on our shed some years ago in the UK to replace an asbestos one (which we carefully removed, bagged and then took to the local tip where they have a special container for asbestos. We have noticed just occasionally the floor inside the shed sows signs of large water droplets having fallen from the roof to the floor.
I don’t recall where it came from, but it was very much like this stuff, though in a lighter grey colour. It’s been good for quite some years and hasn’t grown moss unlike the previous asbestos, still looking smart. The original supplier also did a version that looked like terracotta tiles, though that wasn’t appropriate for our application.
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I have one—it has vents, and you can hear the wind howling when it blows hard!
It’s certainly a little noisy when the rain beats down on it, but I tell myself I’m really lucky to be sheltered and don’t have to worry about leaks.
We re-roofed our house in Florida with steel. We used an ivory painted over galvalume panel and it was still looking pretty good 15 years later. Because it was painted, it actually saved a fair bit of air-conditioning costs over the years (perhaps $10/month or so).
One thing we didn’t foresee was the problem of cut-edge corrosion. Where the condensation runs down and sits on the cut edge over the years it began to corrode. Probably could have been prevented with a bead of paint down the edge.
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