What roof pitch would be good for a home for the London to Chatham-Kent area?
Erpingham House by MSG Architecture - The Erpingham House has a great, modern, passive solar design and I can see it being an affordable rural home design. Would it be possible to design and build a similar design? What roof pitch would be good for a home for the London to Chatham-Kent area?
Thank you for your time
Craig Moorhouse
The roof design on that house is very similar to the roof we built on the LEED V4 Platinum passive solar home we built, so I can say with experience that is a great roof design. A single pitch, low pitch roof is about as easy and safe a roof as you can built, which also means it is the most affordable roof design. That doesn't mean there aren't options, so here is a page that can offer you some food for thought -
Choosing the best roof profile for your home
One thing to consider with very low pitch roofs is they often need to be beefed up to accomodate a snow load, but in southern Ontario that's not a huge concern. Here you can see our video guide on how to build a passive solar home where we discuss why we made the choices we did, which was to keep it as affordable as possible, and to build a green roof. You can learn about that here in our DIY how to build a green roof video.
Roofs won't face any particularly extreme weather conditions, so really I would say it's about designing a roof that is within budget and covering it with long lasting roof covering materials such as metal.