A few years ago, a California woman named Lori Carbone decided to try to figure out how to keep her roof tiles from cracking.
It’s one of the most common roof tile issues, with more than two dozen states having some form of the issue, according to the National Association of Roofing Contractors.
She thought she had an answer.
“I knew it was time to do something,” she told me, when I asked if she had any advice for anyone.
She’s now the owner of a small California company, Argo Roofing, that offers a new range of aluminum roofing tiles that are certified for both U.S. and European use.
Argo is the first to offer aluminum roofs in a large market and to offer an option for customers in a few states.
The company also offers a few more than a dozen other varieties.
Artoid’s tiles are made of aluminum oxide, a material that can withstand high temperatures but is prone to cracking.
Its strength is also great at resisting water intrusion and is a great material for roofs that are made from hard, porous materials like stone or clay.
The material is also a good choice for roofs with more energy-efficient technologies.
“It’s a great product for a lot of different applications,” Argo’s CEO, Mike McKean, said.
“I think the market is really ripe for it.
I think you can take it to the next level and make a lot more money off of it.”
McKeann has spent years trying to make aluminum roof roofs work for people who live in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest.
That’s where Argo got its start.
He and his team were first attracted to aluminum by looking at it in a laboratory.
“We looked at the different types of metals that we could use, the material that was most likely to be the hardest and most durable,” he said.
Aluminum was a “nice” material for roofing because it was cheap, cheap, and cheap, but there were also tradeoffs: the material could crack under extreme temperatures, and it was hard to control the amount of water that was leaking in a storm.
McKeam and his partners realized that there was a better way to deal with water leakage and water pressure.
Aluminum roofs are manufactured in a special room that houses water-resistant tiles.
Each tile is designed to be a different thickness of aluminum that’s then coated with a special kind of hydrophobic material that acts like a membrane, keeping the water out of the tiles.
That thin coating protects the tiles from water damage, and the tiles themselves also have an electrical rating that allows them to withstand high water pressure without cracking.
(Water is a major issue in most storm-related accidents.)
“We really just thought, ‘Let’s try it on this roof,'” McKein said.
They built a test building, tested the tiles, and tested them on people.
The tiles worked fine.
Then they put them on the roof of a house in Oregon.
“Then we did the same thing in Washington, D.C., and then they did a similar test in California, and they said it worked just fine,” McKegan said.
And then they went to New Jersey.
“The problem was we couldn’t test the roof on a roof without water.
The roof was too hard.”
When Argo finally tried to test its aluminum roof on customers in New Jersey, they were surprised by what they found.
“They didn’t notice anything at all,” Mckegan said of customers who’d installed their aluminum roof in the past.
But it wasn’t just customers who seemed to enjoy their new roof.
“When they were installing their roof, it was a pretty positive experience.
It felt like it was the perfect solution,” he added.
“And when they took their roof off and tested it, they noticed the difference.
They saw the difference.”
That was especially true in the Northwest.
“One of the problems we were facing with water and moisture intrusion was the fact that our roof was not as watertight as a lot [of the other] roofs,” McKeegan said, noting that his company has experienced problems with its aluminum roofs from people putting them on roofs that aren’t really watertight.
“But when we tried it, the difference was immediately obvious,” McKEGAN said.
The good news is that the company has the expertise and expertise to make its tiles more watertight and more weather-resistant.
In fact, the company is planning a major expansion to a third facility, in North Carolina, to help its aluminum tiles last longer.
Mckean told me that the expansion will include adding a third test area to help customers understand how to use it safely.
“There’s so much data out there about how to make this material more water- and moisture-resistant,” McKaillan said.
It will also allow Argo to test new aluminum roofs that might be difficult to get approval for in some states.
“That’s when we’re really going