Stopping snow with smart design

By Emma Peterson. 

Brian Cross and Shawn deAngelo share how engineered snow retention systems protect people and property. 

In this episode of Roofing Road Trips®, Karen Edwards sits down with Brian Cross and Shawn deAngelo. Brian is the VP of sales and marketing from Rocky Mountain Snow Guards and also works closely with their product development and technical departments. As for Shawn, he is the Western region sales manager from S-5!. For this episode, the duo talk about the importance of metal roof attachments, specifically snow retention products. 

Brian opened up the conversation with a quick explanation of why snow retention attachments are crucial, saying, “It's a safety thing. When snow builds up on a roof, the roof deck has a tendency to release all the snow at once in one sheet, which is dangerous to people and property that might be underneath it when it starts sliding. What snow retention does is keep those dangerous releases, called snow avalanches from happening.”  

Snow retention systems do this in a variety of ways; some are brackets that are installed in patterns across the entire roof deck that hold snow build up in place while others are fences installed along the edge of a slope that catch the snow before it slides off. Shawn shared a bit more about the different retention systems on the market, saying "At S-5!, we have five or six different snow retention systems. One is a bracket or a clamp that goes into the metal roof or that attaches onto that seam of the roof. When it comes to installing them, it depends on the roof. There are many different profiles, shapes and sizes, so we design our clamps and other products to fit each specific roof type.”  

And when Shawn says they have a product for every roof type, he means it. If they don’t have something, they’re probably developing it right now. Brian shared a bit about how Rocky Mountain Snow Guards develops new snow retention products, saying, “We talk to the contractors who are out in the field to see what they need. From there, our team starts designing products that will improve things like ease of installation or the strength of the guard.” An example of this process is Rocky Mountain Snow Guard’s newest release, the Everest Guard! Shawn explained, “For the Everest Guard, we took the Rocky Guard, one of our flagship products that's done incredible in certain regions, and redesigned it to make it more cost-effective, but also a lot easier to work with because it stacks within itself so it's more maneuverable on the jobsite.” 

Read the transcript or Listen to the full conversation to learn more about snow retention systems.