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The Snow On Your Roof Weighs 7 To 20 Pounds Per Cubic Foot
2015 has brought ‘tons’ of record snow onto the roofs of buildings all across New England. The weight load of the accumulated snow on a roof is astounding, and dangerous.
Today I had the pleasure (sarcasm) of shoveling most of the snow off the roof of my 5th-wheel trailer. I should have shoveled it sooner, but it being parked not so close to the house I wasn’t paying it much attention – until yesterday’s snowfall – when I suddenly realized the predicament and hoped that this wasn’t the ‘straw’ that’s going to ‘break its back’ (or roof!).
I just calculated how many pounds of snow was probably sitting there…
With the trailer slides in, the roof dimensions are 36 feet by 8 feet (288 square feet). I estimated that about 2.5 feet of snow was on the roof. That amounts to 720 cubic feet of snow. Light fluffy snow weighs about 7 pounds per cubic foot, while heavy wet snow can weigh up to 20 pounds. I’ll estimate 7 pounds per square foot in my case. So the total weight up there was about 5000 pounds! or 2.5 tons of snow on the roof! Yikes…
