Benefit of Using Prefabricated Roof Trusses
The next time you admire the roof of a new home or browse through a collection of house plans with eye-catching, intricate roof designs you're probably looking at a roof designed and built using prefabricated roof trusses.
Roof trusses are pre-fabricated, triangulated wood structures, which are built in a factory and carefully designed to carry the load of your home's roof to the outside walls. Then they are shipped to your construction site and installed using a crane after the home's walls have been framed. Nearly 80% of new homes constructed today use pre-manufactured roof trusses instead of traditional rafters to support the roof!
The key benefits of using pre-fabricated roof trusses are cost savings and construction speed. They are also increasingly popular because they allow great flexibility and complexity in roof design.
While the basic advantages have been mentioned above, here is a more detailed list of the benefits of constructing a new home using pre-fabricated roof trusses:
- In conventional roof building, the carpenters build a roof frame, which leaves much to chance and the builder's opinion in terms of the roof's strength. A truss roof system is designed by engineers in a factory to accommodate the specific roof design and meet building codes, which allows for a more uniform size and roof pitch.
- Higher quality materials and strength; roof trusses are fabricated inside a shop, where the materials are not exposed to inclement weather or moisture conditions.
- Trusses can typically be installed in a single day, speeding the home construction process and getting the structure closed up sooner, which helps prevent moisture and other weather elements from getting inside.
- Trusses are cheaper than conventional roof framing due to labor savings and since they are built from shorter lengths of 2x4 lumber rather than the large size lumber required in building rafters and ceiling joists.
- Roof truss systems allow for almost any custom roof design and shape imaginable, allowing features such as cross gables and cathedral ceilings without being prohibitively expensive.
- Roof trusses can span much longer distances without the need for load bearing interior walls.
- The only real disadvantage of roof trusses is that the homeowner ends up with less usable space in the attic area; a very small price to pay!