If you had a copper roof that was forty years old would you sell it and replace it with tiles?

A copper roof should last over a hundred years so why replace it mid life with a short lived alternative?

Is it leaking ?

I've a client interested in copper guttering , I did raise concerns about theft, which he hadn't considered.
Anyone know if you can get it powder coats to disguise it?
Metal theft is very common in my area, drain cover etc. One customer came home from work to find someone had hacked of his lead work above his bay windows , damaging the render , bay ceiling , about £1200 worth of damage for £20 scrap

The copper roofs on the observatories at UCL were replaced after only 200 years, reckon there was another 50 years in them, 30 years on and they are still there.
If we got rid of our stuff that might get stolen we all would have nothing.

Not insane no - what's the expected life of the building ?

In my experience, it's not that uncommon to find a gross mismatch in the material quality and longevity of a variety of discrete building parts - so having a roof covering good for 200 + years on a building where everything else has a 40 or 60 year life is a bit nuts - and the client may well be sensible to sell off the asset and use a tile which gives him say 30 years - which may be what he wants out of his building anyway.

regards

Barney

Nice rhetoric Tony - however, in the real world everything has a cost.

Yes, we may well have clients that know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, but it's no good moaning that you'd like structure, windows, doors and roof that have a 100+ year design life when it's a spec. building going up on a plot on an out of town developement park or it's social housing being built to a cost or it's a school or hospital being paid for down the PFI PPP route.

Or in a similar vein, that the bulding is now needing to be designed for a 1x 10^-3 flood event or a 1 x 10^-4 seismic event - which costs quite a bit of money up front - for a product that's only required to be there for the next 30 or 60 years (or whatever the design criteria are).

Start thinking like that and what's so wrong with cheap and effective timber or steel frame buildings with short (ish) lifetimes but capable of full recycling of contents.

By all means lets have buidings that are "loose fit" and adaptable over time - but if that means clearing a site after say 60 years and rebuilding, that could actually be more environmentally friendly that building structure that has a 200 yeardesign life.

Look at our victorian housing stock - if they hadn't been well built (to the standards and thinking of the time) tyhen we would have swept them away lomg ago and replaced them with something a little less energy hungry and totally unfit for anything other than tinkered, playing round the edges refurbishment.

Think it through in terms of welsh slate roofing 90% of London housing - was it a good idea ?

Regards

Barney

Well, flexibility is the key - and the approach taken will differ from sector to sector in reality

As we say, It might be nice to design a primary school that has sufficient lifespan so it can turn into a chiropody clinic and give the occupants a cradle to grave experience - but in reality ?

Housing, for sure is a prime candidate - but first we'll have to get over that peculiar UK mentailty that housing is permanent and increases in value. Once we clear that hurdle, what's wrong with high efficiency, high density "park homes", in clusters, in the green belt that have no intrinsic value after 30 years other than recovering the material value - no one will worry because buying one will be like buying a car - we expect it to lose value from day one as we use it.

For sure the below ground infrastructure, bases etc can be designed for longevity (lets say 200 years) - but the above ground superstructure may well have been replaced half a dozen or more times by then - it wouldn't take long to work out the sweet spot in terms of materials and energy in and what that costs over XX years to decide the optimum replacement cycle.

Equally we may decide that mass concrete structures of long life with internal pods of short life are the way to go

Ahh well - back to reality

Regards

Barney

Yes Tony it was madness replacing the copper at the time, especially as the rest of the building was Portland Stone and grade 1 listed and good for a thousand years. They must have won that Euro-million or something!