Many roofing contractors use roof chemicals or other roof cleaning products in attempt to kill the algae or moss growth on your roof. Unfortunately, these are short term solutions that can cause long term problems. One of the more popular roof chemicals used on a shake roof is called Copper Naphthenate. Patrick D. Morin explains what Copper Napthenate is and what it does to shake roofs.
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This is Patrick Morin, Roof Life of Oregon, we’re on a shake roof in Lake Oswego March 31st 2010. People always ask me why we do we use the products that we use on shake roofs to maintain them. One of the products we don’t use, and we’ve never used, is Copper Naphthenate. Copper Naphthenate is a metallic metal that’s a really good wood preservative, but when a roof is held on by galvanized fasteners zinc and copper are opposing metals and when mixed with water they corrode. This is a beautiful shake and what’s happened is this is a 60 galvanized nail, but you can see it’s just corroded right off of there. The copper this roof was treated with has eaten the fasteners. These shakes are starting to fall out of the roof, not because they’re decayed, but because the treatment that was put on reacts with the zinc based metal which is galvanization.
Roof Life has the exclusive license for the Portland area to use Dennco Chemical Company’s patented shake roof preservatives. These chemicals are non-toxic, environmentally-friendly and highly effective at extending the life of your roof by killing moss and fungus and keeping them from coming back. If you’re interested in taking a step forward instead of backwards with other roof chemicals call Roof Life of Oregon for a free roof inspection.