What Materials Can Be Used For A Residential Truss?
What Materials Are Used To Make Residential
Trusses In Omaha, NE?
Choosing The Right Materials
Ensures Your Truss Project
Is Built To Last
Whether you’re building a roof for a new home, a garage, or a tool shed, you‘ll need to consider the type of materials you’ll use for a residential truss in Omaha, NE.
Why?
A residential truss plays an important role in your home’s roofing system, helping to evenly distribute your roof’s weight throughout your building’s exterior walls and supports.
This is how your home remains strong and stable enough to withstand storms, tornadoes, and other inclement weather. So, you want to use the right materials to ensure your trusses are equipped to handle the workload.
Choosing the right materials for your residential trusses is essential, as they can directly affect your roof’s structural integrity. Each material can determine your roof’s stability and ability to withstand harsh elements such as high winds, debris, and snow.
The materials you choose will also impact other factors, such as cost, suitability, and the care required to maintain your trusses. So before you start picking materials, you’ll want to consider:
- The type of roof you’re hoping to install vs. what your local building code will allow you to have in the area
- The material that works best with the type of trusses needed to support your roof
Here at North Country Truss, we want to help you make the best decision for your roofing needs. With that in mind, let’s examine the various types of trusses and the materials you can use when installing them with your roof.
What Are The Best Materials To Use For
A Residential Truss?
Timber, engineered wood products, or steel are often the best materials for any residential truss. Each material has pros and cons, so it’s good to familiarize yourself with each to determine what would work best with your roof.
Timber
Timber is most commonly used for residential roof trusses. It’s cheap and lightweight, making fabricating and moving wood trusses on-site or at a manufacturing facility easy.
Another good thing about timber? It’s a renewable resource — which means you’re lowering your carbon footprint when you use it instead of other construction materials.
And let’s not forget – if you use timber for residential trusses, the wood’s natural beauty will greatly increase the visual appeal of your home.
That’s why timber is most widely used in many types of roof trusses, including:
- King post trusses
- Queen post trusses
- Gable trusses
Because of its versatility, timber is great for other complex roof designs, like a hip roof or vaulted ceilings in your home.
Timber is also excellent for attic trusses (also known as room-in-the-attic trusses) if you are trying to build additional living or storage space in your roof.
At North Country Truss, we provide the finest timber in the Midwest. Our MSR-2400 grade lumber is machine-tested for strength and durability – allowing us to create the most reliable timber residential trusses for your home.
Steel
Because of its high strength ratio, steel is more commonly used in flat roofs for larger structures like warehouses and factories.
It can be easily fabricated in many shapes and sizes to meet various structural requirements, making it the go-to option for commercial buildings.
However, steel is more expensive to purchase and install than lumber and doesn’t provide the gorgeous wood finish you get with timber, so it’s not a popular option for homeowners.
Engineered Wood Products
Engineered wood is made of combined wood products—such as scrap wood, shredded fibers, sawdust, and pieces of wood—making it stronger and more durable than natural wood.
Just like steel, engineered wood can easily be manufactured in various shapes and sizes to meet your specific building needs or roof design.
The best part? Engineered wood trusses can cover larger distances, so you can use them to create bigger spaces if you need to add extra room to the roof.
However, there is a downside to using engineered wood instead of timber.
Timber has a more solid and thicker layer of wood, allowing it to be sanded and refinished as often as needed. Meanwhile, engineered wood has a much thinner layer, which limits how many times it can be refinished.
Ultimately, you can use any of the materials we’ve discussed for any type of residential trusses, but it all depends on what would work best for your needs.
If you need help figuring out what materials work best for your residential trusses in Omaha, NE, then talk to our experts at North Country Truss. Call (tel) or visit us online and get a free quote today from the number one truss shop in the Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska.