Built the way these materials actually demand.
Cedar, standing seam metal, slate, copper, and tile all fail the same way when they're installed by people who don't work in them every day: not because the material was wrong, but because the details underneath it were rushed. Here's what each material actually requires, what drives its cost, what goes wrong, and how you can tell the difference before it's on your roof.
Talk Materials With UsCedar shake grades, exposure, and why airflow matters more than the wood
Cedar shake is graded before it ever reaches a roof. Grade #1 (Blue Label) is 100% clear heartwood, edge grain, tapersawn or hand-split. It's the grade specified for anything meant to last. Lower grades allow sapwood and flat grain, which cup, split, and rot years earlier. A homeowner comparing bids should ask the grade by name, not just "cedar shake."
Hand-split shakes have a rougher, more rustic split face; taper-sawn shakes are sawn on both sides for a cleaner, more uniform look. Both are legitimate. The choice is aesthetic, not a quality shortcut, as long as the grade is right.
Most cedar failures in north Georgia's humidity aren't wood failures. They're airflow failures. Cedar has to dry out between rain events on both faces. Nailed straight to solid plywood decking with no gap underneath, the underside never dries, and the shakes rot from below in well under half their rated life while looking fine from the ground. Correct installation uses skip sheathing or a cedar breather/batten system that lets air move under every course.
What goes wrong
Beyond missing ventilation: exposure stretched past spec to make material go further, which drops coverage from three layers to two and shortens life; nails driven too high or too low instead of positioned so the course above conceals them; no felt interlayment between courses, letting wind-driven rain wick sideways under the shakes.
How to tell good work from bad
Courses run straight with consistent exposure. Joints between adjacent shakes are staggered at least 1.5" from the joints in the course below and above. If you can see the underside from the attic, there's a visible gap or breather mat, not shakes laid flat on solid decking. Valleys and wall intersections use the flashing details below, not caulk.
Standing seam versus exposed fastener. They are not the same roof
"Metal roof" covers two genuinely different products, and the price difference between them is not padding. Standing seam panels lock together mechanically at raised vertical seams and attach to the deck through concealed clips. No fastener ever penetrates the panel face. Because the panel isn't pinned down rigidly, it can expand and contract with temperature swings without stressing a fastener. Properly installed, it's routinely a 40 to 60 year roof.
Exposed fastener panels, ribbed panel, 5V, corrugated, are screwed directly through the panel face. Each screw is sealed with a rubber washer. They're a legitimate, lower-cost product for the right application, but every one of those washers is a wear part. Georgia's UV exposure and heat cycling harden and crack rubber washers in roughly 10 to 15 years, and once they do, every one of those hundreds of penetrations is a potential leak point.
Ask any metal roofing bid directly: is the seam mechanically double-locked or snap-lock, and are there any exposed fasteners on the field of the panel? Some products are marketed loosely as "standing seam" when they're closer to a snap-together exposed-look panel. The answer should be specific, not "it's basically the same thing."
What drives cost
Panel gauge and material (steel vs. aluminum vs. copper), seam type, finish system (Kynar/PVDF coatings hold color far longer than baked enamel), and roof geometry. A roof with more hips, valleys, and penetrations needs more seams, more trim, and more labor per square than a simple gable.
What goes wrong
Panels fastened too rigidly with no allowance for thermal movement crack or oil-can. Dissimilar metals in direct contact, copper flashing against a steel panel for instance, set up galvanic corrosion that eats through the less noble metal over years. Clips spaced too far apart let panels rack in wind.
Slate: the roof, and the roof underneath it, need to last the same amount of time
Quarried slate is graded largely by thickness and consistency. S1 grade slate is rated for a 75 to 100+ year service life and is what's specified on a genuine restoration or high-end new build. Slate is also, by a wide margin, the heaviest common roofing material. Before it goes on, the structure underneath, rafters and decking, often needs engineering review and reinforcement. That structural step is frequently missing from budget slate quotes, and it's not optional.
The detail that actually determines whether a slate roof reaches its rated life is the flashing, not the slate. Slate this durable has to be flashed in copper. Steel or aluminum flashing will fail decades before the slate does, which means tearing up sound slate just to replace flashing that was never going to last as long as the stone around it.
What goes wrong
Galvanized nails instead of copper or stainless. Galvanized corrodes and slates slide loose within years, not decades. Nail holes punched too close to the edge, which cracks the slate under thermal stress. Foot traffic during unrelated work (gutter cleaning, chimney service) cracking slates that go unnoticed until a leak shows up somewhere else on the roof entirely, because water travels sideways under slate before it finds a way in.
How to tell good work from bad
Consistent coursing and exposure across the whole roof. Copper flashing at every valley, chimney, and penetration. Ask specifically what metal is being used. Hip and ridge slates properly lapped and mechanically fastened. No visibly slipped, cracked, or mismatched slates.
Why slate quotes vary so much. Two bids for "the same slate roof" can differ by tens of thousands of dollars because one includes structural reinforcement and copper flashing throughout, and the other doesn't, until the framing inspection turns up a problem or the steel flashing fails at year twenty.
Copper as a roof, and copper as the flashing that protects everything else
Full copper roofs are rare and genuinely premium. 16 to 20oz copper sheet, seamed or soldered, weathering from bright metal to a brown patina and eventually the familiar green over decades, with a service life that regularly exceeds a century. More often, copper's job on a high-end roof is as flashing: valleys, chimneys, dormers, and any penetration on a slate, tile, or premium cedar roof, because it's the one common flashing metal with a lifespan that actually matches the roofing material around it.
What drives cost
Copper is priced against a fluctuating commodity market, so material cost moves independently of labor. Soldered seam work, required for watertight copper valleys and built-in gutters, is a specialized, slow skill; there are meaningfully fewer people who solder copper well than who can run screws into a metal panel.
What goes wrong
Copper in direct contact with a less noble metal sets up galvanic corrosion that eats through the other metal, sometimes quickly. Aluminum gutters, galvanized flashing, and steel fasteners are common culprits. Long copper runs without expansion joints oil-can and eventually split at the seams as the metal expands and contracts. Soldered joints done too quickly leave pinholes that won't show up as a leak for a season or two.
How to tell good work from bad
Solder lines are clean, continuous, and smooth. No lumps, no pinholes. Copper is isolated from dissimilar metals with a membrane or isolation strip wherever they'd otherwise touch. Long runs show visible expansion detailing rather than one continuous rigid sheet.
Tile: the underlayment is doing more work than the tile is
Clay tile is fired through, so its color is permanent. It doesn't fade because there's no coating to wear off. Concrete tile costs less but carries its color in a surface coating that can fade or wear over decades. Both are heavy, both routinely exceed 50 years of service, and both need the same structural check slate does before installation.
Here's what surprises most homeowners: tile is not a sealed, waterproof membrane by itself. It's closer to a rain screen. It sheds the bulk of the water, but wind-driven rain gets underneath it, and the underlayment beneath the tile is the material actually doing the waterproofing. A 50-year tile roof installed over cheap 15# felt is a roof where the water barrier fails at 15 to 20 years while the tile on top still looks brand new, which means a full tear-off and re-lay of sound tile just to replace what's underneath it.
What drives cost
Structural verification, underlayment quality (self-adhered or high-grade synthetic vs. felt), battens vs. direct-to-deck mounting, and the complexity of hip and ridge tile detailing.
What goes wrong
Underlayment quality cut to hit a price point. Broken tiles from foot traffic left unrepaired. Ridge and hip tiles set in mortar or foam alone instead of being mechanically fastened, so they work loose over time.
How to tell good work from bad
Ask specifically what underlayment is specified, by product name, not just "underlayment included." Consistent tile alignment and coursing. Ridge and hip tiles mechanically fastened, not just bedded.
The details that actually determine whether a roof leaks
Almost no roof fails in the middle of a clean, open field of material. They fail at the transitions: valleys, walls, chimneys, skylights, where two planes or two materials meet. This is true whether the field material is cedar, metal, slate, tile, or asphalt. These two details are worth understanding regardless of what's specified for the rest of the roof.
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