ok- weve used alot of steel roofing at our place- I LOVE it for some things. If your buildings gonna be a showpiece, and you have to go steel, it should be standing seam....no exposed fasteners, all covered by the lap. Raised rib roofing is great on outbuildings, barns, sheds, and the like. Super easy to install...Ive done all of ours, and had no problem. A screw with a gasket and a nutsetter head is how its fastened. I use a cordless drill with a spare battery and a nutsetter bit. And when screwing the stuff, always screw on the FLAT, not the rib...you'll crush the rob with screws, it might leak. Another must is to make usre you square up first, if not, you fight the stuff thru the whole job. The steel roofing is nice because it comes in different colors, up to 24' long, and can be sheared to length, when ordering. So, if you have, say, 19'6", you can have it cut so. for the sake of argument, say we are installing a 20' section....its 3' wide, so we are installing .6 squares....quickly. Its fairly light, much less so than shingles. There is a plethora of trim pieces, etc as well (rake, ridge, facia, etc). Perforations are more difficult as well tho. There are vent pipe flashings, etc. And for the record, you can use this stuff over old work (shingles), but its not that great an idea. We did one where the customer had those old asbestos shingles on the roof....had to try to get them removed ($$$$$) or cover them....covered them.
Snow....slippery...can you say avalanche? there are fittings to put up there and keep the snow from sliding off, buuuut, then you are hugely increasing your snow load...where I am, we load roofs for engineering purposes at 35 lb/sq-ft Live Load, and 15 Lb/sq-ft dead load, but if you keep the snow up there, itll be MUCH more...so we live with the avalanches....it all comes down at once too...not in little drips and drops...the whole roof...at once.....
All in all, a good product for the right application.
