[Greenbuilding] experience with Enviroshake?

[Keith Winston]

You may be right about rushing to market, or even a bad batch or 
something. Also, the moisture issue was more at the core of my point 
than temperature -- I was thinking that perhaps Enviroshakes were 
supposed to be installed on wood strips to "breathe," and that hadn't 
been done. But I looked them up, and they are installed pretty much just 
like asphalt/composite shingles. I think without some pictures and 
perhaps more details, we can't have much idea what went wrong. It may be 
that they were just installed too tight, which often happens with 
asphalt/composite shingles. According to their press releases, the 
product was released in 2002, after 6 years of development. It's 95% 
agricultural fibers and recycled industrial waste, though they won't 
release many details to further break that down, it seems.

I haven't looked closely at Enviroshakes. They might also be stamped 
from (rolled) sheet products.

Keith


abetterbuilder at frontiernet.net wrote:
> Quoting Keith Winston <keith at earthsunenergy.com>:
>
>   
>> I don't have experience with Enviroshakes, so I don't know if it's a
>> faulty product. But often roofing fails for a reason: wrong
>> preparation/underlayment, wrong nailing, installed too tight, etc. The
>> most likely thing that I can imagine might curl corners would be
>> excessive heat and/or trapped moisture, which would tend to point
>> towards faulty preparation.
>>
>> Lower corners on the shingles should be overlapping the lower course. 
>> Trapped moisture should hardly  affect a rubber shingle that far down 
>> without affecting the upper part as well.
>>     
> Any roofing project should be engineered to withstand the high 
> temperatures found on roofs.
> "Memory" is also unlikely to be a cause, as the shingles were certainly 
> cast in their installed shape.
> I would suspect that the manufacturer rushed the product to market 
> without a long term field test. Lab simulations don't always mimic real 
> world conditions.
> Bruce Donelson
> A Better Builder
>
>
>
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-- 
Keith Winston
Earth Sun Energy Systems
3927 Madison St.
Hyattsville, MD 20781
301-980-6325
keith at earthsunenergy.com
www.EarthSunEnergy.com