[Greenbuilding] Green Roof under deck
RT
archilogic at yahoo.ca
Thu Jan 24 18:11:10 CST 2013
On Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:34:24 -0500, Gennaro Brooks-Church - Eco Brooklyn
<info at ecobrooklyn.com> wrote:
> 3" green roof on his brownstone plus a deck that sits 2' above
> the roof.
> I suggested a glass deck and green roof under it.
Unless the tempered glass is of the textured variety, an outdoor glass
deck sounds like a slippery, falling-accident nightmare waiting to happen.
For good idea of what will happen, take a mop and wet the surface of a
polished marble or granite floor and then entice some people you don't
like to walk across the floor.
OTOH, take that same tempered glass and use it to create a sloped glass
over-roof and the green-roofed roof deck becomes an outdoor room that
could potentially be used year-round.
Whereas with the glass deck any moisture landing on it would be a dreaded
life-safety hazard, moisture landing on the glass over-roof becomes a
harvestable, desirable, life-giving resource. In fact, some of the
tempered glass could be used to create rainwater cisterns.
[Irrelevant sidebar which you may want to skip if your time is limited ]
Speaking of tempered glass:
A couple of weeks ago, on one of the porch roofs on my home there were
some snow accumulations that were high enough to obscure the tops of some
of the windows on adjacent walls.
Adjacent to the porch roof where there's a cantilevered glass canopy
sheltering a walkway below, I noticed that a sheet of glass had been
pushed off of one the longitudinal edge supports by the massive pile of
ice and snow working its way outwards with the help of the sun and gravity
so that the length of the sheet of glass was supported only at the ends
relative to that edge ... making for a very surprising downwards bow in
the , a deflection of at least 3" due to the weight of the pile of ice and
snow sitting on top.
I was fully expecting that glass to explode and rain down a shower of
(harmless) glass chunks if it were to get another pile of snow dumped onto
it from a nearby steeply-sloped metal roof so I skeedaddled on up there
and shoveled off the pile of ice/snow sitting on the glass and the porch
roof.
[sidebar to sidebar: After I returned outside from going in to have a cup
of tea, my dog Zhoq was peering down at me from a roof canopy on another
side of the house. He had climbed up onto a pergola roof via the pile of
show I had shoveled off of the roof and had been hopping around from one
roof to another, sniffing out red squirrel trails.]
I remembered LL-man telling this List about how his Dad (a glass or window
vendor) used to have a display setup where he'd run across the room and
slam into a sheet of tempered glass and according to LL-man, the glass
would bow about 6 inches with the impact but would not break. While I knew
that tempered glass was tough (as when flipped through the air by winds
and tossed onto boulders--with no breakage), I was a bit sceptical about
its ability to deflect 6 inches over a ~6 ft span. I am less so now and
will likely remain so until I try it myself.
Wonderful stuff, that salvaged tempered glass. Eh wot ?
--
=== * ===
Rob Tom AOD257
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c at Y a h o o dot c a >
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit "reply")
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