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Comment by yeetaccount4 | Hacker News Reader

Those will last basically forever. The rib covers the fasteners and prevents water intrusion. The old style corrugated stuff leaks pretty bad unless you torque the screws juuuust right. Pretty sure the grommets under the screw heads degrade after a while, even if you get them perfect.

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> Those will last basically forever.

  Yes, but where? :-) Because those large plates and the attached isolation plates fly damn well when there is a bit of a tempest.

New Zealand. Not the windiest place (Wellington is an exception).

There's a housing project local to me that installed a bunch of these metal roofs about 20 years ago, and very few are left, they've been replacing them with asphalt shingles. I'm not aware of why, but I presume something went wrong. Certainly the gov't spends as little as it can get away with on those houses, they probably thought it would be cheaper in the long run than asphalt when they did it.

That, or, some politician made a deal with a roofing company to get some perfectly good roofs replaced.

Installing them requires qualified labor. You have to crimp each standing seam just right for the roof to remain watertight. Installing corrugated iron or shingles is much easier in comparison.

It blows my mind that one could screw up corrugated iron roofing. It lasts a long time and is pretty basic to install. Many old villas here in New Zealand have their roofs replaced and they are about 100 years old. Arthur’s Pass down south has houses entirely clad in an every version of the stuff (it’s thick and heavy) and they are over 100 years old now.

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