This article is a bit painful to read. It should be lessons from living in the remote wildnerness in winter. Pretty much all those problems are relative to rural infrastructure and poor home building. If you live in an area with heavy snow load you want an A-frame roof to de-load the roof (for example see: Tahoe, CA ~ 500-800" snow a year).
Most Tahoe buildings are not A-frames, 500-800" snow years are big years, not average, and also those are resort numbers, not towns where more houses are. Modern buildings in Tahoe are engineered to hold very high snow loads, typically have a lot of snow on the roof, you need to do snow removal as needed.
I live in Mammoth where the town is significantly snowier than say Truckee or lake level Tahoe. The grocery store is open and operating normally no matter how snowy it is. Including the 22/23 winter when 695" fell in town. Lots of buildings did collapse that year though and snow removal was a constant struggle.
But A-frames or other very angled roofs are not typical here, roofs have to handle 300 lbs/sq foot, and there are requirements for where a roof is allowed to shed to. Typically they will angle in one direction to control where shedding happens. Keeping the snow on the roof also provides insulation, in a typical snow year we may do basically no removal and just have a blanket of snow on the roof the whole winter.
This isn't fully true.
Snow can be bad enough to a point where even modern cement build building can have trouble.
EDIT: I didn't realize A-frame refers to a _very_ steep angle instead of "just" a slightly steeply tilted roof.
And A-frame roof help but do _not_ magically fix it, with the right kind of snow condition it can get stuck to the roof anyway and turn into ice there. This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people. And sure it's should be a rare exception if you have stable build buildings. But rare exceptions happens anyway even in places with good infrastructure and/or cities etc.
Similar while power outages really should not happen, sometimes there are natural catastrophes (or terrorist attacks) and power is gone for days anyway.
Being prepared helps. Even if it's a situation which counts as natural disaster and external help will be provided, knowing that you aren't reliant on it and they can focus on people much more in need is nice.
PS: I'm not a preper or anything, just prepared in the sense of basic knowledge and some minimal preparations like flash lights, water, food you can eat without stove, a larger battery, somewhat weather proof clothes, etc. Nothing fancy, nothing usable long term. Just enough to bridge some days of an local emergency situation.
> This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people.
A-frames are steeply-angled enough that the weight mostly loads on itself (i.e. a snow drift builds up against the side of the house) rather than loading the roof. The whole point of the design is to be steeper than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_repose of snow, so that snow can't pile up on the roof to the point that it forms ice; it must slough off quickly, as soon as it reaches some aggregation threshold — just like water droplets must drip down off a shower door after some aggregation threshold.
("Slow" snowfall, meanwhile, gets melted away rather than frozen on; the A-frame is the entire building envelope, and is also usually made of a highly thermally-conductive material; together, these properties mean that 99% of heat lost from the interior is lost into this giant metal heatsink that wraps around the building, where the heat then conducts quickly inside that giant metal heatsink, warming up whatever cold spots there are anywhere along its surface. As long as the building has any kind of heating going on inside, the roof is essentially acting like a heated windshield.)
A-frames also go all the way to the ground. There's nowhere for a person to stand where "snow (or even ice) sloughing off the sides" is dangerous, because there's never a plummet phase to that slough-off; the snow arrives at the ground with very little speed, having been lightly friction-braked the whole time, since it was basically sliding down a metal slide. (That being said, you would never build an A-frame house under the expectation of having accessible sidewalks around it during the winter. You assume that snow drifts will pile up on both sides. You want to go to the back yard? You go through the house. This is also why you never see an A-frame surrounded with a fence: the inevitable snowdrift would knock any side-fences over.)
The part about power outages is certainly true in Tahoe. I grew up there and remember a week-long power outage as a kid, since the snow took out the feeder lines from both CA and NV simultaneously.
Outages that long aren't common, but it's not uncommon to lose power for about a day a few times each winter.
You'll even find ubiquitous A-frames in Southern California in mountain ranges. Crestline, Arrowhead, Big Bear, etc.
A-frame houses are not efficient in terms of space inside and thermal properties (both because of low volume to surface ratio). It's sufficient to have 40-45° root pitch to avoid snow accumulation.
Depends what you are optimizing for -- roof collapse in a high snow load local or the level of efficiency for thermal properties. You can drive for high efficiency of your thermal properties but when your roof collapses those efficiencies are meaningless.
Home design is a game of engineering tradeoffs with the occasional new technology to improve things or lower costs.
An A-frame is a overkill solution to snow load when you can just make a shallower roof stronger.
only to a limit
enough snow, especially if compacted, especially if it involves melting + refreezing cycles turning part of it too ice and even robust concrete building can have some surprising issues
but it's true that for what most places in the world need a slightly tilted and structural stable roof is good enough, if you know how to clean it if things to south
If you get that much snow you should build heating into the roof to melt the snow just enough to slide off
A-frames are often used in snowy climates as a vacation home, park ranger patrol station, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilderness_hut. Such buildings are un-lived-in for much of the year, if not "indefinitely until needed." The building needs to survive, not being crushed by snow, without any human supervision.
As TFA emphasizes, grid electricity is unstable in rural places in winter; which means that even if such a building were able to be grid-connected (often not), and even if the building's owner was willing to spend electricity heating the building year-round in their absence (almost certainly not), the building would be likely to lose electricity at the worst possible moment: when there's tons of snow piling up and no humans there to shovel it.
Tradition says that this is not true but honestly I have no real experience except I have done the calculation for our roof. According to our local building standards at 60⁰ you basically have zero snow load, I am not sure what angle a shallow angle roof is but 30⁰ is max load. 6kN/m² is a lot of extra strength.
In Finland, where you can easily get 30cm or more snow, all roofs are required to stand 100-300kg/m2 by law and most roofs are less than 30 degrees (e.g. 1:2 ratio).
A-frame or even 45degree angle roofs are very rare.
30cm is just kinda cute. Try 600cm - you'll find a lot of A-frames up the mountain, where they routinely get >700cm of snow each year and generally no thaw until spring. Alaska, similarly, but there you'll find more domes and steep-roofed chalets, since it gets proper cold (-40) and insulation uber alles is the rule.
The other benefit of an A-frame is that the snow drifts deeply enough that winter-only cabins don't need as much insulation, because there's a 4m drift on all sides except the front.
Those kinds of places are also where you find "doors to nowhere" on the 2nd floor, because that's the winter access. One door at ground level for summer, one door ~1.5-2m up for winter.
I love visiting, but I'll never live there!
I read this as in Finland you can get 30cm snow in a day. And the second person is comparing that to 600cm in a year. Am I right?
Total accumulation matters in roof design, not single-day dumps. The mountain I'm referring to (and others like it) can get 100cm+ single day, but that's not super common.
Helsinki, for example, only gets a total of ~90cm a year. So the mountain sees more snow in a single event some years than Helsinki all year.
Just looking at a map though, and Helsinki is on the south coast. It appears Finland extends right up to the Arctic circle. I would guess they get more snow up there? Any Finns like to chime in?
https://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/snow-statistics
Upwards of 80cm in finnish lapland, so quite a bit of snow, but not the ~2-3 meters common in the high sierras and cascades. This is mostly because the elevation is low and the sea exposure is smaller (wind blows from the pacific over the mountain and dumps snow). The Paradise Snowtel on Rainier, for example, routinely has 3-6 meters / 10-20 feet of snow in winter, and is one of the snowiest places on earth. The only place I'm aware of that has more is Aomori Prefecture in Japan and they have similar geography.
The only limit to how strong you can make a roof is really money. If you space joists or trusses half as far apart you will about double the max snow load.
At a certain point the problem stops being the roof, and starts being subsidence of the ground under the increasingly-heavy building.
That would be a LOT of snow.
Why not "just" make a weaker roof steeper?
imagine finding this painful to read because it doesn't describe your world
[dead]