An asphalt shingle roof has flexible asphalt shingles as the ridge cap. At the ridge the shingles on one side of the roof simply extend past the ridge or there is a ridge cap consisting of boards, copper, or lead sheeting. Many shingle installations benefit from being placed on top of an underlayment material such as asphalt felt paper to prevent leaks even from wind driven rain and snow and ice dams in cold climates. All shingle roofs are installed from the bottom upward beginning with a starter course and the edge seams offset to avoid leaks. The type of shingle is taken into account before construction because the material affects the roof pitch and construction method: Some shingles can be installed on lath where others need solid sheathing (sheeting) on the roof deck. Roof shingles, like other building materials on vernacular buildings, are typically of a material locally available. Roof shingles are almost always highly visible and so are an important aspect of a building's aesthetics in patterns, textures and colors. The ridge is often covered with a ridge cap, board, piece, or roll, sometimes with a special ridge vent material. The first course is the starter course and the last being a ridge course or ridge slates for a slate roof. Shingles are laid in courses, usually with each shingle offset from its neighbors. Shingles historically were called tiles, and shingle was a term applied to wood shingles, as is still mostly the case outside the US. Shingle is a corruption of German Schindel meaning a roofing slate. Look up Schindel in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. They are a very common roofing material in the United States. Roof shingles may deteriorate faster and need to repel more water than wall shingles. Ceramic roof tiles, which still dominate in Europe and some parts of Asia, are still usually called tiles. Shingles are held by the roof rafters and are made of various materials such as wood, slate, flagstone, metal, plastic, and composite materials such as fibre cement and asphalt shingles. These elements are typically flat, rectangular shapes laid in courses from the bottom edge of the roof up, with each successive course overlapping the joints below. Roof shingles are a roof covering consisting of individual overlapping elements.

With an area of 6000 m 2, it was one of the largest wooden shingle roofs in Europe. JSTOR ( January 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ī shingle roof in Zakopane, Poland.Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

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Metal roof shingles