05-05-2019, 09:23 AM
Everybody talks about handling snow well but there are snowy areas in europe where the more snow they get the flatter they make the roofs. You can't build a roof that'll shed snow and just walk away. People die that way. So you make a roof that won't hold snow then turn around and put snow fences and brackets on the roof to keep the snow there. Also snow is free insulation. There is also no way that an architect or engineer can derate the snow load on a roof because it is steep. They can't count on the snow sliding off when they need it to. It is just one of those human foibles that we all have that tend to cause us trouble to assume that something can happen and does happen that it will happen in a useful way. The one thing that can be said of a steep roof is that a roof truss that is deep from bottom chord to roof peak is simply a deep beam and hence stronger. A thicker wing is stronger too. It could hold as much snow if you turned it over with the flat part up and the peak sticking down into your living room.
About easier to build, maybe if they are small but I read a story about a family building one who switched over to building a conventional cabin when they tried to lift up the first frame and dropped it. You are sort of limited to 1 or 1 1/2 stories tall. I can't imagine standing 3 story frames up without a crane or without them bending like a 35' long 2 x 12 the flat way.
There is an inherent benefit to presenting two entire facets of the building to the weather that have no windows and shield the house all the way to the ground. Given the availability of Simpson brackets, milled lumber, and plywood you can build a house arbitrarily strong so the whole triangles are strong thing goes away. Made a huge difference when we were leaning tree trunks together and lashing them with vines though.
I agree about the teepee similarity.
About easier to build, maybe if they are small but I read a story about a family building one who switched over to building a conventional cabin when they tried to lift up the first frame and dropped it. You are sort of limited to 1 or 1 1/2 stories tall. I can't imagine standing 3 story frames up without a crane or without them bending like a 35' long 2 x 12 the flat way.
There is an inherent benefit to presenting two entire facets of the building to the weather that have no windows and shield the house all the way to the ground. Given the availability of Simpson brackets, milled lumber, and plywood you can build a house arbitrarily strong so the whole triangles are strong thing goes away. Made a huge difference when we were leaning tree trunks together and lashing them with vines though.
I agree about the teepee similarity.