My house is hot in the southern United States. Trying to add insulation in the attic space during the summer almost killed me last year. The attic was so unbelievably hot. I have developed a roof leak and was thinking about a metal roof on top of my current roof. I was wondering why a metal roof can’t be installed on braces a few inches above an existing roof to function as a roof and shade. The airflow between the two would have to cool the attic, much better than if the heat radiated through straight to the shingles and plywood. We bought a sunshade for our back patio, and I’ve thought about even something as simple as that over smaller homes could drastically help.
In: Engineering
There’s no theoretical reason you couldn’t other than it would have to be a structure that’s larger than the house that would have to stand up to tough weather, and shade isn’t always desired.
They actually do exactly this with RVs in some places because RVs are not as well insulated and take a total beating in the sun. So at some of the nicer RV parks in the Southwest were it gets really hot they have covered RV spots to get the RV out of the sun.
In practice, local codes are not going to be your friend on this kind of thing, and your HOA will probably go effing crazy if you tried it…
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