When building the ‘home of your dreams’ you will be confronted with multiple choices that need to be made. Whether you should install trusses or rafters is just one of these decisions. But it is a biggy. Is there a difference between the two? Yes there is. Let’s take a closer look.
It should go without saying, South Africa has an energy problem. If you need to know more, we’ve been sitting with this issue since 2007 with no solution in sight. With this in mind, when planning your next home in South Africa you need to ensure that you have plans to provide your own electricity – like installing solar panels. Here are some truss aspects to think about when planning to place solar panels on your roof.
Like any product on the market, it’s only as good as the materials used to build it. The same is true for roof trusses. While we’ve discussed the types and family of roof trusses, we’ve never spoken about the individual parts that go into making our roof trusses. Here are the main material parts of a truss.
It should go without saying, designing a roof truss is a complex process. We’ve dived deep into many of these aspects in numerous blogs throughout 2019. You can find them here, here, and here.
But even as experienced as we are, there are always tools of the trade that make our work easier. Like utilising 3D software. We’re not sure how truss fabricators did it accurately in the past, pre-computer era.
But for us, the interesting part is the roof trusses. After all, the man in red and white, driving a sky-bound sleigh carries roughly 300 000 tonnes of presents. So, is your roof ready to handle this much mass? Actually, can your trusses handle all the natural curveballs that this jolly man throws at it? Let’s answer these questions so the smaller members of the family don’t lie awake at night worrying. But let’s get one thing straight at the beginning, the answer is OBVIOUSLY YES!
It might come as a surprise to you (the reader), but roof trusses can fail. After all, they sell bits-and-bobs for trusses at the local hardware store where any average Joe can try their hand at truss building. We don’t let amateurs work on our trusses which is why none of our trusses has ever failed.
When you choose a professional service, like us, you get bespoke, designed trusses that will be created with solutions to challenges we can identify in the early stages. An example of this would be pooling areas on your roof.
But you might be surprised to learn that these trusses are designed and prefabricated off-site. Why though? Well here are some solid reasons:
For your information, there are numerous families of truss designs that have individual layouts within them. So, whether you’re looking for something a little bit fancy, practical, or just bog-standard, there is a very specific design of truss just for you.
As the seasons change and the rains start to move in, you might be a little more aware of the potential waterproofing issues. This is especially true if you’re currently building a home of your dreams. Small leaks can be costly and hard to locate later on. You’d be surprised how hard it is to locate the source of a leak on a roof, and this often results in a blanket approach of waterproofing the entire surface – which is expensive. Rather than living under a ticking expense time-bomb, here are our top things to look out for when waterproofing your roof, the first time.
Building contractors can cut corners, we all know this, whether you’ve heard it through the grapevine or experienced it first-hand. The fact is, if you take short cuts when manufacturing or erecting a roof truss, it’s bound to fail sometime in the future. No one wants to think they could potentially be living under a ticking time-bomb.
While we can’t stress the importance of this enough, it’s vital to have an engineer inspect the final installation, but if you can’t get one to come to the building site, here are some tips on how to spot a truss that’s bound to cause a headache in the future.