Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
No, a metal roof does the opposite. The intuition comes from touching hot metal. But what matters is not how hot a surface gets, it is how fast it lets that heat go. Metal sheds absorbed heat quickly instead of holding it into the evening the way asphalt does. If your upstairs is hot, the cause is usually the attic.
Judge summer comfort by the attic, not by the roof surface.
Metal releases heat quickly, so the heat entering your house is governed by ventilation and insulation.
Have the attic assessed for intake and exhaust before choosing a material for heat reasons.
A Utah metal roof sheds heat faster than shingles do. What makes your upstairs hot in July is the attic under it, not the metal on top.
Mattie Tueller, Master Roofing
The instinct is completely reasonable. Metal in the sun is hot to touch, hotter than a shingle feels. So it seems obvious that a metal roof would push more heat into the house.
What the instinct misses is that surface temperature is not the same as heat transfer into your living space. The property that matters is emissivity. That describes how readily a material releases absorbed heat back out to the air and sky rather than holding it.
Metal has high emissivity. It gets hot fast and it sheds that heat fast, so when the sun moves off it, it cools quickly. Asphalt behaves like thermal mass: it absorbs heat more slowly and then holds it, continuing to radiate downward into the attic for hours after the sun is gone.
That is why the complaint we hear is almost never about the middle of the afternoon. It is about the upstairs still being hot at nine at night, with the air conditioner running and losing. That evening lag is thermal mass at work. It is the thing metal does not do.
Roof material is a smaller lever here than almost anyone expects. The dominant factor is the attic.
A properly ventilated attic pulls cool outside air in low at the eaves and lets hot air out high at the ridge, continuously. That keeps the attic near outside temperature. The target is within roughly twenty degrees of it. When that airflow is missing or blocked, the attic becomes a heat reservoir sitting directly above your ceiling. It stays hot long after the outside air cools.
The hottest attic we have measured was 180 degrees. Nothing you put on top of a roof fixes that. The heat has nowhere to go, so it goes down into the house.
This is the misdiagnosis worth catching. That's because homeowners with a hot upstairs usually call an air conditioning company rather than a roofer. The AC is not undersized, it is fighting a heat source nobody has addressed. That symptom is walked through in why your upstairs will not cool down in the summer.
So if summer comfort is the reason you are considering metal, the honest sequence is to fix the attic first. It costs less and it is the actual cause.
Having said the roof is the smaller lever, it is not nothing. Metal does bring real advantages.
Color matters too, and lighter finishes absorb less. Utah's UV is intense enough that fade resistance deserves its own question, since some finishes hold up poorly here and red is the notable offender.
If summer comfort is driving this decision, work the list in this order. It is cheapest first and most effective first, which is a rare combination.
Doing it in this order means you fix the real cause and then buy the roof you actually want, rather than paying for a roof hoping it solves an attic problem it was never going to solve.
I get asked this constantly, usually by someone who touched a metal roof on a hot day and drew the obvious conclusion. It is a fair instinct and it points at the wrong thing.
What actually determines whether your upstairs is bearable in July is the attic, not the roof. A vented attic stays close to outside temperature. A sealed-up one becomes an oven sitting on your ceiling. The hottest one we ever measured was 180 degrees. No roofing material on earth fixes that. That's because the heat has nowhere to go but down into the house.
Here is the fair part: homeowners almost never suspect the attic. I do not blame them. The symptom is a hot bedroom and a struggling air conditioner, so people call an HVAC company. They get told the unit is fine, which it is, and nobody thinks to look up. The problem is real and it is just in a place nobody thought to check.
So Master Roofing looks in the attic before recommending anything. Sometimes the answer costs a fraction of a new roof. Before you buy a roof to solve a heat problem, go stand in your attic on a hot afternoon. If it is much more than twenty degrees above the outside temperature, you have found your actual answer. It is not the shingles.
This article is general information about Utah roofs, not an assessment of yours. Every roof is different, and no article can tell you what is actually happening on your specific house. Have a licensed roofing contractor look at it in person before you act on anything here.
It absorbs more solar energy, yes. That's why cool-rated and reflective finishes exist across the color range. The practical difference is smaller than with asphalt though. That's because metal releases whatever it absorbs quickly rather than holding it. Color is worth choosing thoughtfully, and it matters less than the ventilation underneath.
It can, especially with a reflective finish or an above-sheathing air gap. The savings vary enormously with your attic. On a house with a properly vented attic the improvement is modest, since the attic was already doing its job. On a house with a hot attic, fixing the attic will produce a bigger change than the roof does.
This is where the material choice matters most. That's because there is no attic buffering anything and the roof assembly is doing all the work. Shingles over a vaulted ceiling cook from the underside and age faster as a result. Metal, ideally with a ventilated assembly beneath it, is a genuine improvement in that specific situation.
It can reduce radiant heat transfer into the attic. It works best in combination with proper ventilation rather than instead of it. A radiant barrier over a blocked soffit is treating a symptom. Get the airflow right first, then consider whether a barrier adds anything on top of it.
Metal expands and contracts with temperature, and on a poorly detailed installation that movement can produce ticking or popping sounds. A properly designed system accommodates the movement and is quiet. If you hear a metal roof working, that is usually a detailing issue rather than a property of the material.
We're here to see what's going on with your roof. A real assessment starts with your history and your attic, not a number from the driveway. You'll get a straight answer about what's up there, what it needs, and what it costs. Sometimes the honest answer is: your roof looks great.