Roofer Explains Roofing Terms: Roof Components and their meaning | Roofing Insights

In every industry there is always a certain jargon or language that people in that industry speak and unless you work in that industry you have no idea what these people are talking about, so in this video we are going to go back to the basics. I want to cover the different parts of the

roof

and what they are called, so I'm going to start with the most basic term that you may have heard before, but this whole section from this corner to there is called a slope. Some people call them facets, but in this video the We will call it slope and a slope is measured by inclination.

You can see that would actually be a very steep

roof

in real life, but you might hear your

roofer

s talking about that, oh, that's a 9 slope of 12 slope of 10 12 that's an 18 slope 12 that would be steeper. close to what this is but it describes its slope the higher the number the steeper the roof is now down here this leading edge actually has a name it's called the eave this is the horizontal edge of the roof and this is where the roof will be installed initial drip edge strip and this is where

roofer

s actually begin the shingling process.

Now the sloping or sloping part of the roof edge is called the pitch. or your sloped edge again, you can have a drip edge and a leading strip here, that's why we don't have drip edge, but on any house that we build, we actually put drip edge on all the eaves and battens, but when you two you have two rakes that meet and form this big triangle called the gable, so if you ever hear someone say oh you have gable vents, if you look at the big triangle on the side of your house you will see a vent above.

Here, that's a gable vent on your gable side. Now your eaves are made up of a couple of different things. First of all, you usually have a beam tail here and that's where the actual frame is inside this, which I'll show you in a minute, um, it ends, this is called the tail, where it sticks out of the part of the house and it has a fascia and a soffit, the fascia is what these gutters, what's right behind these gutters, let's get in here now, the roof slopes are mainly two different ways in this In case we have two slopes that are in a valley, there are many different ways to make valleys, you have woven valleys, you have uncut valleys, this is what is called an open valley with a W shaped copper flashing, the reason this is Se called W-shaped flashing because it actually looks like a W pretty good now, when we get to the top here, where two slopes meet at a peak, which is actually called a ridge, this black thing you see here, actually It is called a ridge vent. and these shingles that are installed on top of the ridge vent are called ridge shingles.

Now let me take you to the other side and show you what the opposite of a valley is now if you notice these two slopes like each other. The sides come together, but instead of coming together, they come together. This is what we call a hip, so you'll notice that as opposed to having metal or interwoven shingles, these are actually just put together and then we put more ridge shingles on top of them, so this is what makes up the ridge, so now Now that we've covered the basic terminology of the different parts of your roof, I want to tell you something really important: you'll hear your roofer say oh, your roof is 19 squares and that's our way. of measuring the size of a square if you take a square and multiply it by a hundred that gives you the square feet so a 19 square roof is actually 1900 square feet that's just more roofers jargon and you'll hear it if you are shopping for a new roof, but what I want to do now is get into this because I have a little mock attic here and I want to show you those beams that I was talking about because they're very important, so get in here, okay, now we're in this guy. of really small fake attic that we have here, but I want to show you some really key things that you're probably going to hear your roofer talk about, so I said joist before. it's actually a beam this is what this is the structure behind the actual roof this is what holds everything up now down here if you go down here this part that goes through this plate here um the beam that extends down here is called the tail of the beam so I said before there is a beam tail now this part here where the shingles are actually nailed here is osb it's osb sheathing we call it sheathing or roof deck so when you hear someone talk on rotten decks, this is what we're talking about this is what we're talking about that's rotten this is what's holding up or what all the shingles are nailed to right here this simulates a stud wall like this is the exterior wall of your house that all that Hardie Siding in the case of our showroom is nailed down so it is a two by four stud with siding and usually on the outside of this siding it will have some type of barrier against moisture, like a Tyvek home wrap or something.

Okay, now that we're out of that cramped attic, I want to talk about the most common flashings and the terminology used that you'll probably hear, which is why this type of flashing is called a pipe boot if you look. Your roof will look like this, hopefully the shingles will be lowered, but this is called tube flashing. It is used to seal the PVC or round pipes coming out of your roof, making it a pipe or tube. jack, this is a piece of step flashing that is used for flashing anywhere your roof meets a wall or your chimney or something like that and I'm going to show you on this skylight here these pieces here are the same as There's a stepped flashing so you can see that it goes under all of these shingles and what it does is that the water that gets here, instead of getting under the shingles, it's going to hit this metal pan and drip onto the next one, and so on. successively, etc.

Now, if this is against a brick wall or a brick chimney, there will be another piece of metal on top of it called counter flashing and again I'm using this skylight as an example, but let's pretend for a second, that this is a brick chimney. brick and this joint is not here, so if this is just pure brick, water can still go down and get behind this flashing, which is why we install a flashing on top of it that is either cut into the brick or has a bead of sealant in here as well. It's very common to keep water from getting into it, so I just wanted to take a second and cover the basics.

We get a lot of questions and we have a lot of clients who seem to struggle with the terminology and I don't blame them because there's a lot to remember and you're probably only thinking about it a couple of times in your life, so I hope this video was really helpful. If you have any questions or comments, please post them below. and please like and subscribe for more awesome content, thank you.