Re-roofing a Spanish-style house in Florida: concrete, clay, Brava composite, or stamped metal

Happy Hurricane Prep Season to those who celebrate (actual hurricane season is June 1-November 30th, with a peak in mid-September; due to Climate Change, there has been no increase in frequency or intensity of hurricanes since 1851 (Nature Magazine)).

Professor ChatGPT says that the concrete barrel tile roof on our Spanish Colonial Revival house will last 50-75 years:

But then it adds a little something:

Underlayment – Typically lasts 20–30 years and needs replacement before tiles fail.

So the AI thinks the “roof” lasts 75 years even if starts leaking after 20 years because tiles aren’t waterproof and the underlayment is the actual water barrier. All that you need to do to replace the failed underlayment is remove all of the tiles from the house, remove the underlayment, install new underlayment, and then put tiles on top of the underlayment… exactly as you’d be doing in a complete re-roof project.

Our roof was designed to handle a minimum of 140 mph winds, according to the 2003 permit documents, but maybe that was just the code. The tiles are adhered to the underlayment with Polyset AH-160 foam in which the “160” means it can handle 160 mph (if nailed down, tile is good only to about 120 mph (scary comparison video)).

The documents weren’t specific regarding the underlayment used. I emailed the company that built our house and got an immediate response from the owner:

It’s hard to remember 22 years ago, however the typical tile roof construction during this time frame was a 15lb. felt tin tagged dry-in, layer with a 90lb asphalt hot mop layer then the tiles applied mechanically, with mortar or foam adhesive. I suspect you will need a new roof soon.

Our neighbors have been getting new roofs installed either due to leaks or for better insurance quotes or just because everyone in Florida strives to have a house that looks new inside and out. Here are some things that I’ve learned from talking to roofers…

The only thing good about concrete is that it is cheap and it won’t break if walked on; it’s very heavy and the color gets faded by the sun and it supports ugly mold growth. You’d think that it would last forever structurally, but it doesn’t because it absorbs a huge amount of water. Concrete seems to be a “builder-grade” solution.

Clay tile has a reputation for being fragile, but it lasts forever and retains its appearance much better than concrete because mold is less likely to grow and the color of the tile is the color of the material. However, the European-made tile is much more durable than the South American-made tile (cheaper and more prevalent) and can be walked on. If you want to support river-to-the-sea liberation of Palestine (and subsequent Hamas rule over all of what used to be Israel) you can buy Verea tile from Spain. If you want the highest quality most durable tile (“it’s what Trump uses on his building,” a roofer noted), you buy Ludowici tile from Italy. For our room, the Ludowici tile would cost $16,000…. to ship from Ohio. The tile itself would be over $100,000 and take 22 weeks to create. Compare to about $30,000 for Verea tile shipped to Miami and then trucked to our neighborhood and delivered via conveyor belt to the roof. How rich are people in Palm Beach? One roofer who quoted our project said that he had about $60,000 (pre-Biden price) of Ludowici tile on his own house. A customer in Palm Beach ordered it, waited, didn’t like the color when it arrived, and ordered some other color. The tile wasn’t returnable so the customer simply gave it to the roofer.

With Verea, the tile itself will likely be 25-30% of the cost of the entire project. The clay tile can be reused when it is time to re-roof due to underlayment age/failure, but if the tile has been glued down each tile needs to be dipped in solvent and the added labor is almost the same as just buying new tile. If nailed or screwed down, the roof can handle 120 mph wind. If glued, the roof can handle 160 mph wind. Palm Beach County requires that a roofer hire an independent engineer at the end of the project to do a “pull test” on random tiles and make sure that they have sufficient uplift strength. The practical life of a clay tile roof with the highest quality dual-layer underlayment (two different variations from Polyglass; add one more “anchor” layer for breathability if there is closed cell foam underneath the roof deck) is 30-35 years, but insurance companies may demand replacement at 25 years. The tiles can’t fail, but the underlayment does.

Brava has the world’s best roofing material web site, but their roofing materials (composite barrel tiles) aren’t popular. “I’ve installed exactly one,” said a roofer. “It was for a billionaire who had a 5-year-old $500,000 slate roof on a stable and chips were falling on his horses. He wanted a roofing material that couldn’t fall apart. I don’t like the look of them, but they are rated to 211 mph if you use their screws, which I did.” Brava tiles don’t yield any improvement in roof life compared to clay because it is the underlayment that fails. Brava claims to have some “cool roof” tiles that reflect solar heat, but I’m not sure that their specs are better than conventional clay:

Here are some numbers for a Verea red clay tile:

Looks like the natural clay has better reflectance and worse emittance. The biggest drawback, I think, of the Brava tiles is that they can burn. They claim that if the right fireproof underlayment is used the tiles won’t be set on fire by a fire inside the house, I think, but it is difficult to beat a concrete or clay tile for fire resistance!

What about the big hammer of a metal roof? It is tough to see how a metal roof panel with a screw every square foot into the decking is going anywhere. It turns out that the metal roofs stamped into the shape of tiles aren’t very wind-resistant. They can handle only 120-130 mph. The standing seam metal roofs can be fantastically wind-proof (just under 200 mph for steel; just over 200 mph for aluminum), but they won’t look like Spanish barrel tile. The metal roofs have a practical life of 35-50 years before something fails (e.g., fasteners, finish (warranty of 30-35 years and after that they can be refinished for about $20,000)), but the insurance company might demand replacement at 30 years.

So… it turns out that there haven’t been significant improvements since 2003. The adhesive foam that was state-of-the-art then is state-of-the-art now. Maybe this Polyglass peel-and-stick material will last a bit longer than the “hot mop” of asphalt.

One big change for Florida is that HOAs are now limited in their ability to refuse to approve roofs that serve as hurricane protection. FL 720.3035 was amended in 2024. The updated law: “The board or any architectural, construction improvement, or other such similar committee of an association must adopt hurricane protection specifications for each structure or other improvement on a parcel governed by the association. The specifications may include the color and style of hurricane protection products and any other factor deemed relevant by the board. … For purposes of this subsection, the term “hurricane protection” includes, but is not limited to, roof systems recognized by the Florida Building Code which meet ASCE 7-22 standards…”

The law is a little ambiguous in that it says an HOA can establish some aesthetic rules and also implies that homeowners have a right to a roof that meets ASCE 7-22 standards. In our neighborhood, an online “hazard tool” says that we need a 167 mph roof, which I think means that only a metal roof or Brava would work.. On the other hand, I didn’t want to get into a huge fight with the neighborhood Karens to be the first house with a visually jarring standing seam metal roof. Due to Trump-exacerbated climate change, Palm Beach County was most recently hit by a major hurricane in 1949. If another big one arrives, I have a feeling that we will be losing some tiles whereas a Key West-style standing seam metal roof would weather the storm.

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Palm Beach International Boat Show

If you’re in the market for a 150-250′ yacht, the Palm Beach International Boat Show isn’t a terrible place to spend the day (Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show might be bigger/better, I think, and there is also Miami, but both of those shows are spread among multiple locations). Palm Beach Post: “This year [2025] will feature 45 yachts measuring 150 feet or longer and 200 superyachts surpassing 80 feet in length.”

What does it look like overall? Here’s an aerial photo from 2024 (taken from the mighty Robinson R44):

Here’s my report on a day spent strolling around. I can’t show you what the elites see because peasants aren’t allowed into the superyachts. Potential customers must be vetted and accompanied by a broker (a neighbor actually is a yacht broker, but he didn’t invite me to sneak in with him and he was busy trying to close a deal on a 112′ boat for a mini-douche; he says that new boats can usually be had for 10 percent off the list price).

One take-away from the show is that Europe isn’t quite the economic basket case that it appears to be. Americans are generally too lazy/unskilled/unionized to build nice boats at competitive prices and the Bidenflood of 10+ million low-skill migrants didn’t change that. The floating examples of craftsmanship at the boat show were generally made in Poland ($1 million), Italy and China ($1-10 million), or Holland and Germany ($10-50 million).

One of the first boats that I went on, though, happened to be made in Washington State, a Ranger Tug on which I met a guy preparing to do a 1.3-year trip around The Great Loop. He said that Elon Musk’s Starlink was critical to enabling this project because he intended to continue working via Zoom during the voyage. When I mentioned this on Facebook, a loyal Democrat questioned the need for Starlink because, in his view, mobile data service would work perfectly on every mile of the journey. Apparently, all that one needs to make cell phone service 100 percent reliable in the United States is a passionate hatred of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Here’s what a couple’s 31-foot two-bedroom home for more than a year looks like:

(When on the Intracoastal Waterway for this trip, keep the red buoys on your left if going counter-clockwise. The “red right returning” rule is a little challenging to apply on the Intracoastal until you remember that it runs from New Jersey to Texas and, as a training captain told me, “nobody wants to return to New Jersey.”)

What if you need to do the trip in a week instead of 1.3 years? Mercury offers 600 hp V12 outboard motors and 2400-3600 hp on the transom could fulfill your need for speed:

Speaking of the transom, Wiszniewski Yachts is a Polish company, founded by an Axopar partner, whose W43 has a motorized platform behind the outboard motors. When the kids are ready to swim, the platform can be lowered into the water for easy in/out access. Here’s what the 900 hp $800,000 machine looks like from above:

One neat feature has been copied from RVs. The tables appear to be wood, but they’ve got enough steel inside that glasses with embedded magnets will stick to them even if the boat tilts 45 degrees or more.

For those of us who value a quiet boat, the Dutch company Zeelander provides a dBA measurement:

Even more quiet can be obtained with a pure battery-powered Halevai party boat (made in Louisiana and retailing for $185,000):

Note that the company sends power into the outboard half of a Mercury inboard/outboard drive system. That way, in case of damage, it can be repaired at any boatyard.

It’s a fun experience to stroll around. For a $40 lunch break and a glimpse at where the real action is occurring, duck out of the show (the same ticket on your phone gets you back in) to the Ben Hotel. This is where the brokers, lawyers, etc. hang out to negotiate and finalize transactions. Don’t park near the Ben, though! It will be about $10 to park at the Convention Center and then it is a 15-minute walk or a free shuttle bus ride to the event. In 2025, at least, there was a simultaneous art show at the Convention Center and the $35 ticket to the boat show was also accepted for the art show.

Here’s an ultimate redneck vehicle, with Yamaha engines in each pontoon (Shadow Six; $250,000):

If your taste is more refined and you want to save the planet, perhaps this $566,350 Rolls-Royce Spectre will suit:

Note that the government is watching our for us by mandating a calculation of the fuel cost/savings on the window sticker. There were Ferraris, restored Land Rovers, and classic Rolls-Royces on display as well.

It’s a fun event and downtown West Palm Beach is a fun place to hang out even when there is no event. For folks in the Northeast, Chicago, and California who are wondering how the West Palm lifestyle might be different than theirs, here’s a public bathroom inside a public parking garage (Hibiscus):

(If you don’t have kids, I think a condo or apartment in one of the gleaming new buildings in West Palm Beach might be the best place to live in Palm Beach County. Publix, culture, restaurants, an off-the-charts public library, etc. are all within an easy walk. Much of this is due to the efforts of Stephen Ross, developer of City Place and owner of the Miami Dolphins (also a Jewish enabler of the Queers for Palestine movement at the University of Michigan via his hundreds of $millions in donations to the progressive Democrat institution).)

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Value of not having to rub shoulders with a peasant (JetBlue Mint vs. cattle class)

I’m looking at going out to California after teaching FAA private pilot ground school (free and open to the public) at MIT. Here’s a guide to what an elite is willing to pay in order to avoid sitting with the peasants for 7 hours: $700/hr. Prices as of December 19, 2024:

Some “extra room” seats are still available on this flight:

So the alternative isn’t cramped torture.

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Could one make a turkey deep-fryer powered by a Tesla charging cable?

As readers who love pigs get ready to shop and cook for something other than ham to serve for Christmas/Kwanzaa… Here’s what happens when elite New Englanders try to play Redneck for a Day and deep-fry a turkey (ABC):

WESTON, Conn (WPIX) – A home in Connecticut was destroyed over the Thanksgiving holiday due to a turkey frying mishap, local officials confirmed.

The home, located in Weston, caught fire Thursday afternoon after its residents attempted to fry the turkey in their garage, a preliminary investigation revealed.

No injuries were reported. But the home — which has an estimated value of over $4 million dollars, according to listing sites Redfin and Zillow — was quickly engulfed in flames.

Fire departments from the nearby towns of Westport, Wilton, Redding, West Redding, Georgetown, and Easton responded to the place. Crews battled the fire for over 16 hours, according to the Weston department.

The house — which features 11 bedrooms and 9.5 baths, per online listing data — has since been deemed “uninhabitable,” the department said.

Plainly oil, open flame, and elite New Englander is a flammable combination. Did it have to happen this way? The typical elite American has a charging cable at home for his/her/zir/their Tesla. Why not an electric deep fryer powered by this cable? The standard Tesla “Wall Connector” seems to deliver about 11,500 watts of power. That’s nominally about 40,000 BTU, but electric coils around a pot should be 2X as efficient as a gas burner underneath so that’s like an 80,000 BTU gas burner. A standard turkey fryer from Bass Pro Shops has only a 38,000 BTU burner and is theoretically sufficient for an 18 lb. turkey.

Designing and manufacturing this shouldn’t be too expensive by Tesla owner standards. A regular electric deep fryer is about $130. To this, the manufacturer of the “Turksla Deep Fryer” need only add some of the electric car charging protocol electronics and software so that it looks like a car to the charger. Maybe this is tough because Tesla keeps its protocols secret? But on the other hand, Tesla home chargers supposedly support other brands of cars that use industry standards.

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9 years of shear bliss from the Japanese

If you’re looking for Kwanzaa gift ideas, here are the Shun kitchen shears, about $55:

We recently had to toss a pair of Wusthof shears that had gone ridiculously dull. I tried sharpening them with a simple honing steel and it didn’t help. The typical commercial sharpening service won’t handle scissors. I don’t have a sharpening stone. (Maybe some of you all know whether it is practical to sharpen shears like the above? If so, what’s the technique and equipment required?) Despite the fancy German brand name, I think that these were #FakeWusthof made-in-China and cheap ($25 on the Web right now).

I discovered via some Amazon order research that our still-sharp Shun shears celebrated their 9th anniversary of domestic abuse (put in dishwasher for sterilization after cutting meat, for example). They’ve never been sharpened and are still highly effective. The screwdriver blades on the back of the handles are a fun idea, but we have never used them.

I’m not sure if there is a reasonable option for America First enthusiasts. Is there any U.S. company that can compete with the Japanese, Swiss (Kuhn Rikon), or Germans (not the fake Germans in China who made our recently tossed “Wusthof” shears) in standard knives and scissors?

Related:

Update: I bought the more expensive Shun shears and they’re heavier. It’s unclear if they’re better but at least now we have a second pair to use if the first is being sterilized in the multi-hour dishwasher (thanks, regulation!).

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Christmas Gift Ideas

For Democrat friends, the perfect Christmas gift: audiobook of One Way Back, read by the author Christine Blasey Ford (see New version of the Boeing 787 announced: “the Christine Blasey Ford Edition 787, for which the launch customer will be United Airlines. The 787 CBFE is equipped with a fainting couch section for Premier 1K members who are terrified of flying”). Part of the Amazon description:

Her words and courage on that day provided some of the most credible and unforgettable testimony our country has ever witnessed. … This is the real story behind the headlines and the soundbites, a complex, compelling memoir of a scientist, a surfer, a mother, a patriot and an unlikely whistleblower. Ford’s experience shows that when one person steps forward to speak truth to power, she adds to a collective whole, causing “a ripple that might one day become a wave.”

If your friend is, like Kamala Harris, a San Francisco/Berkeley Democrat, We See Each Other: A Black, Trans Journey Through TV and Film:

For Republicans (I’m assuming that nobody here has a Republican as an actual friend, but perhaps a reader will be forced to buy a gift for a business colleague): Mania by Lionel Shriver. (See also The Mandibles: Nobody can agree on what caused the collapse and The Mandibles: turning sex into money before and after an economic collapse.)

Facebook AI has seen me post enthusiastically over the years about Disney World and also about Japanese gardens in various states and countries. It presents me with this advertisement for what would be an original Thomas Kinkade if Thomas Kinkade hadn’t died in 2012 at age 54 (there was a great profile of him in New Yorker in 2001 before the magazine transitioned to an all-anti-Republican format):

It’s about $780 in 24×36″ size with a rose-colored frame, which I think looks better than the above:

Considering that $780 is on track to be the price of a Diet Coke soon enough, should we be collecting this limited edition of what would have been Kinkade’s original work?

For religious friends, how about these prayer and votive candles from Etsy?

How about the Time Magazine “Mandate for Change” cover after Bill Clinton won 43 percent of the popular vote in 1992?

For elite friends with massive fingerprint-magnet Sub-Zero refrigerators… How about this 18×24″ print to go in the middle of a 36-inch fridge or freezer door?

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Can we get a federal law to require call centers to have caller ID?

Here’s one for Brendan Carr, soon to be in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (nytimes)… a regulation that requires call centers to have caller ID so that they don’t hassle Americans with “What is your phone number?” questions. As far as I can tell, customer “service” call centers are the only users of the American telephone system that don’t have caller ID, thus leading to the annoying phenomenon of having to provide one’s phone number, the agent having to type it in, etc.

The worst offender in this regard seems to be General Electric. They have an automated system that has called me about 10 times regarding our fancy Monogram gas range. One of the things that we like about it is that LED rings behind each burner control knob light up to show that a burner is on. Or at least they did until the entire system failed. GE sent out a tech who, predictably, decided that parts were required. GE then began shipping out parts in dribs and drabs. After each shipment, the company’s automated system would tell me to schedule a return visit. Then I would press some buttons to talk to a human who would, after asking for my phone number (keep in mind that GE had actually placed the call and, apparently, no longer had the phone number that it had used) say, “We can’t schedule service until the parts are delivered“.

(I did ask “Why is your system programmed to make calls when a part is shipped and ask me to schedule with a live agent if you can’t schedule anything until after a part is delivered?” and, of course, the agents didn’t agree with me that there was anything suboptimal about GE’s system.)

I recognize that this would seem to be at odds with my general support for smaller government, but telecom is already heavily regulated, purportedly for our benefit.

Separately, I would love to know how roughly a dozen parts are required to fix what, in my humble engineer’s brain, must be attributable to the failure of a single component (none of the six burner controls has a working backlight and I think we have a full set of parts for each of the burner knobs, but I have to believe that the root cause is upstream from the knobs).

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Why isn’t the Ring camera smart enough to notice that a garage door has been left open?

We live in the glorious age of AI. Here in our concrete block hurricane-resistant fortress we have a Ring camera in the back of the garage pointed at the door. It’s called “Garage” in the Ring app. Why isn’t it smart enough to wake up once every 30 minutes and, if appropriate, notify us that the garage door has been left open for half an hour? That doesn’t seem like a huge ask of our future robot overlords.

There’s an “AI” company here in Palm Beach County called Levatas that claims to be able to do stuff like this. Amazon/Ring presumably also has plenty of smart programmers. They claim to have delivered AI recently. Why haven’t they done the basics?

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One year until many of the world’s PCs can be taken over by a 10-year-old?

As the righteous in Tim Walz’s Minnesota, California, and Maskachusetts observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day and deplore the time when a hated Jew inflicted a Nakba on the entirely peaceful Native Americans, let’s look at the 21st century way to conquer a big part of the world.

From Microsoft, back in June:

I think this is because my desktop computer was running a CPU/chipset/motherboard configuration from 2015 that lacks some modern security features, such as a Trusted Platform Module.

I wonder if a lot of people won’t upgrade despite Microsoft’s threats. After all, improvements in computer hardware have slowed to a crawl (see GPU performance improvements since 2015 (and why not just use motherboard graphics?) in which we learn that the 2015 CPU had reasonable performance by 2022 standards. With Microsoft not bothering to continue with security updates and nearly every PC connected to the Internet, will a smart 10-year-old be able to take over a substantial fraction of the world’s computers? This is not an open-source computer program that folks other than Microsoft can debug and patch.

Circling back to Indigenous Peoples’ Day… remember that immigration wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to Native Americans, but Science proves that immigration will be the best thing that has ever happened to Native-Born Americans.

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Why aren’t there front load washing machines with the same depth as top load washing machines?

A lot of houses have closets and hallways architected to fit a standard top loading washing machine, which seems to have been roughly 27x27x44″ high. Here’s a 3.9 cu. ft. Whirlpool:

By cheating just a little, e.g., stretching the depth to 27 and 7/8″, Whirlpool can deliver a machine with a 5.2 cu. ft. drum.

It would seem obvious to build a front load washing machine with the same 27×27″ footprint, but nobody seems to do that. One of Whirlpool’s smaller front loaders is advertised as “closet-depth” and, in fact, is about 31.5″ deep. Their bigger front loaders are over 33 inches deep with the door closed. If you scale down to a “compact” front loader, as seen in Europe, the footprint is 24×24″ and capacity drops to just 1.9 cu. ft.

What’s the engineering challenge to making a front loading washer that exactly fits the footprint of a legacy washing machine and, thus, fits into an older American house as it was originally designed?

(Our house is an example of one in which 27-inch depth is the limit. The laundry room connects the family room/kitchen to the garage. A machine deeper than 27 inches will stick out beyond the door frame (top of the figure below) and obstruct access into the garage:

In fact, the only way to have 27-inch deep machines not poke into the hallway is to dig into the 4-inch drywall behind the machines, e.g., to make water and gas connections. Everything must be perfectly positioned for the machines to sit flush on the baseboard.

In other fun appliance news, an architect who redesigned our Harvard Square apartment’s kitchen notched out cabinets to precisely fit a particular LG fridge that we bought back in 2013. The fridge has French doors, which introduces another point of failure beyond a conventional side-by-side fridge or bottom-freezer fridge. The “mullion door” or “flapper door” in the middle of the French doors had a failed spring. I thought about buying a replacement, but was concerned that the notches wouldn’t work for the new fridge and also I couldn’t find any current fridges that had stainless steel sides as the old one did. Thus, it was time to think about repairing the minor problem with the 11-year-old fridge.

I was renting it out on AirBnB, couldn’t get up to Cambridge to fix it myself, and didn’t want to hassle my friend from MIT who is a mechanical genius but has his own 130-year-old 3-story wooden house to maintain. I called LG service and they offered a fixed $399 flat-rate repair fee. I gave them the model and serial number in advance and told them exactly what the problem was and what part was needed. The technician came out to the apartment, diagnosed the problem as the flapper door, and then said that no replacement part was available (the LG Parts web site showed a compatible replacement and eBay had the exact part number available from an appliance store that apparently had a lot of old stock). While monkeying with the fridge, he managed to short out the control board so the fridge went from “tough to close” to “completely dead.” The flapper door actually has an electrical connection to the control system in order to run a heater that prevents condensation from forming on the door. I then asked a series of people who answered LG’s 800 number with thick Indian accents whether I could perhaps get a refund of the $399 repair fee since they themselves acknowledged that they hadn’t repaired anything. They never simply refused to refund the money, but always said that it would be considered by some other group and that someone would get back to me. Of course, nobody ever did get back to me and LG never did issue any refund.

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