Snow Guards for Architects & Designers

When snow avalanches off of a rooftop, it can damage anything in its path! This sudden release of snow can be dramatic—dumping tons of snow all at once. Falling snow forms a temperature-sensitive bond to the surface of a metal roof. As that roof is warmed, whether from the sun or from building heat loss, the bond with the snow is broken and a thin film of melt water serves to lubricate the roof. This can have dramatic results as a several-ton blanket of snow suddenly slides off the roof and avalanches down upon anything in its path: gutters, vehicles, landscape, even people. Once piled up below, that same snow bank can go on to cause additional troubles, like direct damage to the building walls, or even indirect damage caused by funneling melt water into, rather than away from, the wall. This is what makes snow retention devices desirable: they hold the snow back and allow it to leave the roof slowly, either in small amounts of snow or as melt water, avoiding the dual calamity of the avalanche.

Yes, ColorGard®, X-Gard™, DualGard™ and SnoFence™ can easily be retrofitted to existing roofs or incorporated onto a new construction design. They can be installed any time of year using power tools that are common to the trade.Yes! Contractors everywhere love the ease of assembly, the simplicity, and the durability of our S-5! snow retention systems. This should come as no surprise, because the S-5! systems were designed by a contractor who was tired of inferior products that were wretched to install and performed poorly. These systems were then field tested and refined in the Colorado Rocky Mountains where snow challenges are extreme. The result was a line of unsurpassed snow retention systems based on S-5! clamping technology.

Today’s metal roof products have premium finishes made from fluorocarbons which are similar in composition to Teflon, the popular non-stick coating on cookware. These paint resins, Hylar® and Kynar® by tradename, are wonderful performing finishes that were never intended for the glue-on type snow retention systems. People continue to try testing this combination, but an adhesive device on a nonstick surface continues to offer high failure rates. In addition, most adhesives are temperature-cure compounds. This limits their application to warm weather only, and the glues can take weeks to fully cure.

Note, too, that adhesives are chemically organic compounds. Ozone and ultraviolate light cause the chemical bonds to degrade over time. This means that an adhesive tested for ultimate load-to-failure in a laboratory may well show favorable results. But after five or ten years of exposure to heat cycling, UV radiation, moisture and ozone, the weakened chemical bond often causes the system to fail at unacceptably low loads. Will that happen on your roof? No one can say for sure, and it’s that very issue of unpredictability that makes adhesives a risky choice. Our S-5! attachment technology, on the other hand, is mechanical, stable and predictable. It’s derived from non corrosive metals that are unaffected by temperature, UV light or ozone. Their attachment performance does not change over time—if you love it today, you’ll still love it 50 years from now.

Note: When relying upon lab tested load figures, the setscrew tension should be periodically verified using a calibrated wrench.