Green roofs or Living Roofs have many positive effects. They can absorb rainwater, provide insulation, create a habitat for wildlife and look awesome! Billytkid gives a tutorial on installing a green roof via instructables
Picture of Build a Living Roof / Green Roof
Make a normal flat or sloped roof into a beautiful living garden.
While redeveloping our house we decided to install a living roof on our kitchen roof, why you ask.. well..:
1. I liked the idea of having a bit more greenery in the property (we live in central London)
2. We wanted somewhere for some wildlife to have (bees etc)
3. Insulation – green roofs are brilliant at insulating, both keeping heat in and cold out.
After doing quite a bit of reading on the Internet, ok well an afternoon or so, I soon realised that there isn’t a step by step instruction for building a roof garden, just lots of greenies saying how good they are, and lots of companies trying to sell you expensive stuff to do it – so i thought I’d give it a go myself.
Before putting anything on a roof you need to make sure its strong, very strong.
As we’d just had this roof made we ensured we’d had is strengthened – there are 10 joists under the roof, each bolted next to another joist and supported by a steel frame at either end – so its super strong just to be sure.
I found online is that living roofs can weight anything up to 150KG per SqM, so I asked our builder and engineer to work to a dead weight of 150KG – whats a ‘dead weight’ I hear you ask – well.. thats the weight it’ll be when there is just itself up there, a live weight is stuff like water (rain), snow or the bloke on a ladder trying to install a satellite dish.
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