Stacking Shingles and the Weight of it all
Our posts about receiving the roof truss delivery and the video showing what it is like swinging the trusses into place were such a big hit that we thought we would continue with the roof theme. What we have here is a picture of our crew loading shingles onto the roof. We use a variety of specialized large equipment to build our houses. This truck is a tandem (two axles with four wheels each) with an additional drop axle (four additional wheels that are at the rear of the truck in the raised position) flatbed with a boom crane located at the front of the bed. It is capable of loading a full pallet of shingles up to a second or third story roof. The job that this truck performs is delivering shingles to the job site. You may have seen them driving down the road, but have you every witnessed one in action? This particular delivery was for an extremely large roof that covered 15,000 square feet of living space.
Asphalt shingles are extremely heavy. The Architectural grade, also called dimensional shingles, are thicker than the Three Tab shingles and therefor weigh more. Three Tab shingles weigh between 60 - 80 pounds per bundle while Architectural Shingles weigh between 70 - 100 pounds per bundle. Shingles for a home are calculated in squares, or segments of 100 square feet. One square of roof requires three bundles of shingles. That means that there can be around 300 pounds of shingle weight per square of roof. A typical roof for an average sized home will be around 16 to 20 squares. You can figure that there will be around 5,100 pounds of shingles for a 20 square roof using 60 bundles with a bundle weight of 85 pounds. Just to have some more math fun, there are 42 bundles of shingles per pallet/ skid. So that same roof would require one and a half pallets of shingles. That same pallet of shingles would weigh in at 3,570 lbs. The truck in the picture above can haul nine pallets of shingles collectively weighing 32,130 pounds, or enough shingles for a 126 square roof. Now that’s a big roof!