This year we added a new feature to Roofing Contractor - the RC Book Club. In this section, which appears every other month on the last page of our print issue - industry leaders share their favorite titles and let readers know how the books inspired them and helped their companies.
For those of us in the Midwest, it’s been a cold start to spring. Winter has held on a bit longer than usual, and it’s just a hunch but I think that’s part of the reason the economy is still in the doldrums. It seems people have been in a sort of hibernation, waiting for things to pick up.
At the corner of Woodward and Jefferson in downtown Detroit, the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center houses courtrooms, city offices and the mayor’s office. It’s also famous for the statue that abuts it-Marshall Fredericks’ bronze statue “the Spirit of Detroit”-or, as it’s also known, the Jolly Green Giant. Recently, at the same time the statue was being refurbished, a splash of green was added to the building’s rooftop in the form of a garden roof.
I just heard about an interesting new product the other day. Energy Alternatives LLC announced the introduction of its Greenward Ridge Vent. According to Ted Poulos, Vice President of Energy Alternatives, the patent-pending design harvests ambient hot attic air as it escapes through the ridge of the roof.
In the world of solar roofing, the solar panels commonly output direct current (DC), which is commonly channeled to an inverter, which converts it to alternating current (AC). One company looking to eliminate wiring to a large central inverter is Akeena Solar (www.akeena.com), headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif.
The concept is fascinating: You just send in the address of a residential or commercial building, and you receive a detailed report with an aerial photo and line drawings of the roof with length, pitch and area noted for easy and accurate estimates and professional presentations.
Slate is one of the oldest and most durable roofing materials. It’s also one of the most beautiful. Slate roofs have crowned landmark buildings for centuries, and some of these roofs have lasted hundreds of years.
Stopping leaks is part of any roofing contractor’s job description. Other common tasks include securing edge metal and repairing cuts and failing seams in a variety of low-slope roof systems. Chris Margarites, the president of EternaBond, says his revolutionary roofing tape can be the answer to all of these problems - and then some.
If you’ve been by the EternaBond booth at a trade show, perhaps Chris Margarites has flagged you down and given you this demonstration: He uses his EternaBond roofing tape to join a piece of metal to a piece of EPDM to a piece of PVC to a piece of just about anything and dares attendees to pull them apart.