At National Roofing, we want to help in any way we can to eradicate cancer. So this past Sunday (the 29th of April, 2012), we participated as a group in a breast cancer walk.

Currently, someone very dear to the company, a former employee at National Roofing, and a family member to many of us here, is fighting for her life against breast cancer. In honor of her struggle, we were represented as "Team Kathy".

We managed to raise over $1100 dollars for cancer research. While in many ways this is a small effort, every little bit helps and we are happy to contribute. Someday, through our efforts, and companies like ours, we will have a cure and every little thing we do today hastens the day that cure arrives.

If you're looking for a way to help fight the war on cancer apart from donating money or cancer walks, you make want to look into the Folding@home project. It's a distributed computer project run through Stanford that runs experimental models on protein folding.

We would like to extend to Kathy, and anyone else affected by this terrible disease, our love and support as they fight on. We will keep doing our part to end this affliction. 

Everyone wants to put solar panels on the roof. They’re large, bulky, kind of ugly even, and so it makes sense to get them out of the way by putting them up where nobody goes, on to a roof.

The big question is where you put them on the roof. On one of these grocery stores, we put the solar panels parallel to the skylights. It made the system look a little cleaner, but it caused us to have to do twice as much preparation of the roof. 

Single-ply roofs, like TPO and EPDM, are made up of large sheets of material that are either welded or adhered together depending on assembly. Where these sheets are welded or adhered together a seam is created. These seams are where these roofs can be the most fragile, and thus care must be taken to protect these areas.

On one of these grocery stores, we managed to set up the racks for the solar panels so that they sat in between the seams. On the other, the racks hit almost every seam, and thus each seam had to be protected before we could put the racks down.

So it was the same assembly, but based on how we laid out the racking system, the cost of each was massively different. This is likely to be true of every roof mounted solar system, where it gets placed on the roof will have a dramatic effect on what the final cost of the installation is.

Since we at National Roofing like installing solar projects, and we also like saving our customers money where it is responsible to do so (i.e. not horribly dangerous), if you are thinking of starting a solar project, give us a call. At a minimum, we can provide information on how the solar system will be best integrated into the roofing assembly, and we will be happy to do so.

National Roofing is Thinking on Top – so you don’t have to worry about it.

Read more over at Solar Novus.

Since the whole marketplace seems to be experiencing a wide-eyed, childlike giddiness over “green” products, some people have realized that you can mark up a product, even a completely worthless one, call it “green” and idiots will line up to buy it. This is less prevalent in construction, and probably more prevalent with the “green” products under your kitchen sink, which are so environmentally friendly that we use them as sterilization agents.

This isn’t to say that “green” products are a fraud, or that you should ignore calls for environmentally sound practices, no, believe me, these are usually a good thing, it’s just that most people have no idea what makes a product “green” and instead just trust that because a product claims to be “green” that it has to be good for the environment.

“Green” as an adjective isn’t well defined, unless you’re talking about the color, and even then there’s gray areas (see what I did there?) like tennis balls (are they green or yellow?). For example, recycling is thought of as a green practice, until you realize that you need another set of garbage trucks to collect the recycling, and that generates more air pollution than would be generated if people didn’t recycle, and so recycling is actually bad for the environment (I’m told that this is called “irony”).

Now, some of these “green” products are actually, um,  “green” and helpful to the environment. There’s a new tile made out of a special concrete that through magic (by which I mean chemistry) actually eats the nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere, which is to say that this new roofing tile absorbs smog. This is truly a “green” product, and one that actively scrubs out air pollutants, which are probably the most dangerous type of pollutants because of that whole climate change thing.

The point is not that “green” products are a scam, but that in order to actually practice things like environmental sustainability, everyone needs to do their homework and realize that while intuition and common sense may suggest a product is “green”, the actual science behind the product may be the complete opposite of environmentally sound.

At National Roofing, because we care about the environment and sustainability, we are constantly doing research and our own evaluations and investigations into if a product is truly “green” or not. Since “green” products typically cost a little extra, it’s very important that the consumer actually receive what they think they’re getting, and that’s our pledge to you. If you decide to get a “green” roof through National Roofing, we will make absolutely clear just exactly how “green” a product is, and if there isn’t something “greener” available. Not just because we happen to care about the environment, or because we’re dedicated to honesty in customer service, those are true too, but because people’s good intentions shouldn’t be used to fleece them out of extra money, especially when the product does the opposite of what it is supposed to. That’s just bad business.

So if you have any questions about the environmental soundness of a roofing product or practice, please do not hesitate to call or write to us. We’ll give you a straight answer, and if we don’t know right then and there, we’ll look it up and get back to you.

Also, gift cards. Get family and friends what they've always wanted: roof maintenance and repair. Oh, you laugh, but then it starts dumping rain and the wind starts howling, and suddenly you're googling "roofing company + emergency" in the middle of the night and you end up borrowing money from your mother-in-law to pay for it, and then you go bald and lose your job, and before you know it, you're on the street and addicted to crack. So if you don't want that to happen, think about a roofing maintenance and repair gift certificate.

We'll start posting real news and photos as soon as the guy that does that gets out of the repair shop. We had to replace his engine because apparently you can't put unleaded fuel in a diesel engine. Who knew?

In our efforts to maintain the illusion of being a technically savvy company, we now have a blog.

Blog, as you should know, is a portmanteau of the words, "web", "log" and "anti-disestablishmentarianism". Also, thanks to a new federal law requiring all websites to have a place to put "cryptic, furious rants written at four in the morning after drinking half a fifth of gin and calling up at least two ex-girlfriends", we are now legally obligated to host this thing. That's the exact wording of the law by the way.

Now, while I happen to be allergic to gin, I'm not going to go around breaking the law on the Internet. Oh no. I know all about the internet police, and since that cartoon rabbit convinced me to stop taking my medication and I "parked" a cement truck in a local community center swimming pool, I'm not taking any chances.

So here you have it, we now have a blog. We've purchased some ointments that are supposed to help make it stop itching, and we're pretty sure, like 43% sure, that it isn't contagious. Also the ointments smell good. Good enough to eat, but when you eat the ointment, it tastes a lot like soap, lamb, thyme, strawberry chutney, and salt, only with the consistancy of sun ripened cream cheese.

So join us here, on this blog thing, where we will share all of the print that's fit to news, and probably some meaningless drivel like this as well.

You're welcome.