Category: Florida

Harry Potter Pinball Machine Review (and the Free Play Florida experience)

by philg

I attended Free Play Florida in Orlando last month and the machine that everyone loved and wanted to play was the new Jersey Jack Harry Potter design. It has a fascinating and frighteningly intricate flow (I can’t imagine it being successfully maintained in an arcade and there were a few stuck balls). The lighting is much brighter and better than on some previous Jersey Jack designs where it is tough to follow the ball without strong ambient room light. The typical attendee was older, male, and white, but there were some kids and also some women (central Florida and, therefore, the nonbinary weren’t strongly represented):

Speaking of nonbinary, if you can overlook J.K. Rowling’s heresy against Science, i.e., her position that there is a distinction to be made between male and female humans, this would be an awesome home machine. I’ve never read the Harry Potter books and I can’t keep the movies straight, but I loved it!

On the flip side of the Jersey Jack world, they also had the Avatar machine. I thought the movie was dumb and the pinball machine is underwhelming. It ranks #32 in the Pinside Top 100 while Harry Potter is near the top (ratings for the CE version). There was never anyone waiting to play either of the two Avatar machines while there was always at least one person waiting to play one of the three Harry Potter machines. Speaking of waiting, there was no official policy but I never saw anyone play more than one game on a machine for which someone was waiting. It seems that in a society with shared values there is no need for an explicit rule. Everyone was super polite!

The Jersey Jack Godfather was also there. Although it is a great and still-relevant movie (Somalis in Minnesota seem to have been following “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns”), its underwhelming #70 ranking on the Pinside Top 100 seems justified.

What else happens when old white guys organize a convention? A classic computer area! Here’s an emulator for the PDP 11/70 that I used in 1978 as a Fortran programmer at NASA:

Lots of classic home computers as well:

And a luggable:

I would love to thank the person who built this enormous skee ball machine with 5-gallon buckets for the slots:

The convention featured pinball tournaments as well as a charity drive for Florida-based Project Pinball, which places and maintains machines in children’s hospitals nationwide. There were a moderate number of classic machines, but various commercial arcades have more and better-maintained collections.

The most unusual video game was this Jubeat rhythm game from Japan. You play against others around the world, I think, and log in using a Tokyo Metro card. The gal playing in this photo is an Orlando local who apparently loves Japan so much that she just happened to have a Tokyo Metro card with her. I played it and learned that I have no rhythm.

After the Sunday 4 pm wind-down for the convention, I zipped over to Celebration, a Disney-designed New Urbanism community. It’s only a few years older than our beloved Abacoa, but it seems uglier except for the lake. Here’s on example of the architecture:

As in our neighborhoods, they decorated for Christmas before Thanksgiving:

Some photos of the best that Celebration can look:

In a 15-minute walk, I encountered at least three women covered according to Islamic tradition, so that would make Celebration a better place for finding a Muslim community than Abacoa (I’ve never seen even a hijab, much less a burqa; teenage and adult females in Abacoa may wear short skirts, halter tops, bikinis, and other un-Islamic outfits):

Celebration has a distinctly non-Halal outpost of Tampa’s Columbia Restaurant, founded in 1903. Pork, bacon, and alcohol lurk everywhere on the menu, e.g.,

Finally, Happy Gazpacho Day to those who celebrate!

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Meet at Art Basel in Miami Beach on Friday for lunch? Or breakfast in Miami?

by philg

It’s Art Basel time again here in Florida. See Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Miami 2021 for some photos of earlier versions. Who wants to meet at the event on Friday for lunch? Please email philg@mit.edu with a subject line of “Meet at Art Basel” if interested. Alternatively, we can meet near my hotel for breakfast on Friday. Paying $2,000/night to be with all of the fabulous people in the heart of Miami Beach is a mere rounding error for me, which is why I’ll be across the Venetian Causeway next to Trinity Cathedral. I’ll be blasting back north via Brightline in the evening.

A prescient work by Christine Wang from 2021:

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The lazy Floridian’s Halloween and Christmas lighting

by philg

Happy Official Beginning of Christmas Season for those who celebrate. (I guess younger Americans think it is okay to decorate for Christmas even before Thanksgiving.)

Gretchen Wilson and lyricist John Rich in “Redneck Woman”:

And I keep my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long

It turns out that HOAs aren’t huge fans of this approach. Traditionally people get cheap strings of outdoor-rated lights and put them up themselves or hire professionals to do it for $thousands. The light strings then have to come down after New Year’s. The typical Florida house, however, is built with a lot of exterior light sockets. There are recessed cans underneath loggias, for example, and the typical house has plenty of loggias where people can sit outside in the shade. There will be some sort of front entrance light, perhaps coach-style lights with candelabra bulbs. There may be flood light sockets that can hold PAR38 bulbs.

Why not turn the house itself into the holiday light display? Replace all of the existing bulbs and recessed trims with RGB WiFi, Zigbee, and/or Thread bulbs? This is a report on our 2025 mostly-Govee solution.

We opted for an all-WiFi approach because we wouldn’t have to plug in a bridge, e.g., the one required by Philips Hue. Also, we have reasonably good WiFi coverage even outdoors thanks to TP-Link Omada (still going strong after 3.5 years, though it doesn’t even try to do most of the stuff that Unifi offers to do).

The front of our house has 6 candelabra bulbs that we replaced with Govee ($10/bulb). The 8 recessed cans we filled with Govee trims at $30 each. Govee, unfortunately, doesn’t make anything in PAR38 so we got Feit RGB WiFi bulbs at $15 each. For a table lamp inside we replaced a three-way bulb with a $20 Govee 1200 lumen RGB bulb. We already had some entryway recessed bulbs (BR40 and BR30) on the Philips Wiz system (their ghetto-level WiFi bulbs for people who don’t want to invest in Hue). I installed everything myself after borrowing a neighbor’s ladder for the floods and had it all connected up in less than two hours, including setting on/off schedules for each group of bulbs.

For a little more visual pizazz we indulged in two Govee light strips ($120 each for 100′) that we can hide in the bushes, but will likely have to roll up and store until next fall in order to keep them safe from the landscapers. These required some extra work because their power supplies aren’t waterproof so I purchased waterproof boxes from Home Depot. Finally, I tried to find a use for a 50′ string of Govee “permanent outdoor lights”, intended for under-eave attachment, that I’d previously tried out around a loggia in a failed experiment. These too have a non-weatherproof power supply.

The Govee app has a few built-in holiday schemes and, of course, lights can be infinitely customized by the patient or simply set to a solid color of one’s choice. Loyal readers won’t be surprised to learn how disappointed I was that there is no Pride festival scheme.

The Feit app is more basic and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have even a Christmas scheme. The Wiz V2 app is perhaps somewhere in the middle in terms of power/complexity. It probably makes the most sense to stick with either all-Govee or, if money is no object, Philips Hue.

How did it work out? The flood lights ended up being a mistake. A bright light of color (not a hateful “colored light”) pointing at the viewer’s face isn’t useful. We got plunged into a world of tech support hell with the WiFi Govee lights after an Omada outdoor access point failed and we let the TP-Link tech support folks in to change a bunch of roaming settings. The Govee lights don’t work well if the WiFi network is trying to be clever about supporting roaming and optimizing the access point selection for each device. Probably it is smarter to user Matter over Thread or Zigbee (Philips Hue) and thus have just one hub that is a WiFi client. Many of the Govee devices are compatible with Thread, though not fully controllable using their app via Thread.

Our neighbor’s awesome house, mostly done with inexpensive non-WiFi stick-in-the-ground 12V lights (handheld RGB control):

Our house, using primarily the sockets it was built with (we can’t take credit for the lion statues; they were installed by a previous owner!):

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Wall Street Journal warns New Yorkers not to move to Florida

by philg

New York-based journalists love to write about how New York taxpayers shouldn’t flee to Florida and skip paying 14.8 percent state/city income tax, 8.9 percent sales tax, and 16 percent estate tax (vs. 6-7 percent sales tax in FL and 0 percent income/estate). Here’s a recent example, “The Worst Housing Market in America Is Now Florida’s Cape Coral”:

The median home price soared nearly 75% to $419,000 in three years, transforming the character of this middle-income community that for decades has catered to retirees and small investors. … Home prices for Cape Coral-Fort Myers have tumbled 11% in the two years through May

So the prices went up about 56 percent, over a five-year period. That’s before adjusting for Bidenflation. What happened in the U.S. overall? Prices went from 218 to 331 (source), a rise in nominal dollars of 52 percent:

In other words, for people who bought a house five years ago (the average tenure in a house for an American is about 12 years), what the WSJ calls “the worst housing market in America” outperformed the U.S. residential real estate market overall.

What Zillow shows is that the Cape Coral market was more volatile than the national average:

So Cape Coral actually has been a bad market for home-flippers who had the misfortune to buy in at the peak, but for the typical Cape Coral homeowner it has been a better market (albeit, not by much) than the average U.S. real estate market. What about for the elites who put the Wall Street Journal together? How has their Manhattan real estate done by comparison? Zillow:

(“New York County”=Manhattan)

So Cape Coral is objectively speaking the worst housing market in the U.S. (reported as fact/news by the Wall Street Journal rather than as opinion). At the same time, people who owned property in Manhattan fared far worse over the past 6 years or almost any time window within those 6 years.

Related:

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Righteous contempt as Florida follows Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland into non-coerced vaccination of children

by philg

ChatGPT:

Countries like Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and most of Scandinavia do not condition public school attendance on vaccination status. Japan – Vaccines are strongly promoted, but school entry is not denied for unvaccinated children. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland – All Nordic countries besides Iceland follow voluntary vaccination policies for school entry. Switzerland – Vaccination is voluntary, and school entry does not depend on vaccine status.

“Which countries have mandatory childhood vaccination policies?” (Our World in Data):

A Democrat on Facebook:

What’s the punchline to this post? The author lives in… Japan, where childhood vaccines are optional. My response to him:

When do you expect the wave of unvaccinated death to hit Palm Beach, Coral Gables, Bal Harbour, Wellington, and Key Biscayne?

Note that Florida has a free “Vaccines for Children” program in which $200 million/year of injections are administered every year. Florida doesn’t have the highest vaccinate coverage rates for kindergartners, but nonetheless Florida has higher rates than the Orthodox Democrat states of Minnesota and Colorado (CDC).

The trailblazing 2SLGBTQQIA+ governor of Maskachusetts:

I personally doubt that the reduction in vaccine bureaucracy will have a large effect on standard childhood vaccination rates in Florida. People already had the option of opting out for religious reasons. Maybe the vaccination rates will go up if the lack of a legal requirement results in some additional creativity among the public health experts, e.g., free medical marijuana to any parent who brings his/her/zir/their child in for shots, convenient shot clinics at places where children are likely to gather. The Righteous assume that the only way to get humans to do something is to threaten them, but economists have found that very small financial incentives can create dramatic behavioral changes.

If we accept that the government has the right to coerce humans in the name of public health what I would do is force Americans to exercise and maintain a government-monitored BMI. Philip’s Shut-Yo-Pie-Hole System would use cameras and AI to make sure every American gets on a scale in the morning. If over 25 BMI then he/she/ze/they can’t get food other than broccoli at either a supermarket or a restaurant (control with a phone app and step tracker). Add one chicken nugget for every 5000 steps. There would be a chocolate ration of 20 grams (increased from the former value of 30 grams) for anyone with a BMI of under 21.

Loosely related, a friend in a discussion group in Maskachusetts let everyone know that he’d moved to Florida and a Democrat responded:

look on the bright side. At least you will live worry free in Florida: no state taxes, no climate change, no vaccines, and no one to tend to your lawns or clean your pools.

The emphasis on cheap/slave labor via low-skill immigration is fascinating to me. The American Righteous decided to fully open our borders to low-skill migrants almost exactly coinciding with the Age of AI/robots. (Of course, it is actually much easier to get labor in Florida than in Maskachusetts because chillin’ on taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, etc. doesn’t pay as well in Florida as in Maskachusetts (see Table 4 in Cato’s Work v. Welfare Trade-off.)

See also

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Immigrants reproduce faster, so their population can overwhelm food sources before natives have a chance to recover.

by philg

I was doing some research on termite prevention for a friend who recently moved from Maskachusetts to Florida (he and his successful hard-working wife have waved goodbye to the new progressive personal income tax rates in Massachusetts and all of the wonderful progressive programs that it supports). It turns out that the $2000-ish Sentricon system may be a reasonable insurance buy due to Formosan termites, which immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s.

ChatGPT:

Formosan subterranean termites (Coptotermes formosanus) often outcompete native U.S. subterranean termites (Reticulitermes species) when they invade the same area. A Formosan colony can contain several million termites, whereas native subterranean termite colonies often have fewer than a million. They reproduce faster, so their population can overwhelm food sources before natives have a chance to recover.

Formosan termites have foraging territories up to 300 feet from the nest, much larger than that of native species. This gives them access to more food and nesting sites, putting pressure on native termite colonies.

They defend their territory aggressively, sometimes killing or driving out native termites. They consume wood more rapidly, reducing available resources for competing species.

Once they establish themselves, they tend to displace or severely reduce local native termite populations, especially in warm, humid climates like Florida, Hawaii, and the Gulf Coast.

ChatGPT provides a simple “yes” answer to “Would it be fair to say that Formosan termites are therefore replacing native termites?”

Yes — in areas where Coptotermes formosanus becomes well-established, it’s fair to say they are replacing native subterranean termites over time.

When asked “In Dayton, Ohio the total population of humans is decreasing but the immigrant human population is increasing. Would it be fair in that case to say that immigrants are replacing native-born Americans in Dayton?” however, the answer is long and nuanced! Here’s the end of the hemming and hawing:

It’s more accurate to say immigrants are increasing their share of the population as native-born numbers decline, without implying causation.

Loosely related, a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan called “The Migrant Kitchen”:

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Florida question: Why isn’t a compressed air source a standard part of poolside equipment?

by philg

Every Florida pool has an equipment pad nearby with electric power, sometimes natural gas (electric heat pumps are better these days because they’re cheaper to run and can also chill the pool), and filtration. The question for today: Why isn’t there always an electric air compressor on the pad? Given the popularity of inflatables why wouldn’t there be a permanently stationed powerful compressed air source to top up rafts, etc.?

Most compressors don’t seem to be designed to handle the elements, but here’s one with potential:

Has anyone ever seen something similar mounted near a pool? If not, why not?

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Wheels Across the Pond 2025 car show

by philg

In honor of D-Day (June 6, 1944), a few photos from Wheels Across the Pond 2025 car show, an annual event in Jupiter, Florida that showcases British and European cars (April 19 this year). It’s free for spectators and only $45 per car for show vehicle owners so it is unclear how the event survives financially.

Our show began in the $10 premium parking lot with a rare Talbo. These were apparently made in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, one town to the south, beginning in the mid-1990s. One sold in 2023 on BaT for $230,000 (2023 dollars, remember!). The BaT description: “Designed to resemble a Figoni et Falaschi-bodied 1930s Talbot-Lago T150C SS, the car features fiberglass bodywork finished in burgundy over a tubular steel chassis, and power comes from a 5.0-liter Ford V8 paired with an AOD four-speed automatic transmission. … TLC Carrossiers Incorporated was founded by former Pratt & Whitney engineer George Balaschak in 1990 to create a car inspired by the 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C SS that utilized modern running gear.” (Pratt has a big operation, complete with its own airport (private 7000′ runway), just west of Jupiter/PBG.)

A local art car was parked right near the entrance:

(The biggest art on display here is keeping an older Jaguar running!)

A guy whose dad was the original purchaser of a 1967 Morgan exhibited the family heirloom ($4,092 in what we are informed is our inflation-free society; about 75,000 Bidies today for a replica) and let us touch the wood that supports the body:

The English struggled to make decent cars before they were enriched by migrants. Examples:

Now that the UK is fully enriched, the Aston Martin DBX (not based on a Volkswagen like most of the high-dollar European SUVs) is available. It might be worth the $288,000 price if they could just make the interior a little more orange:

Since we don’t care about pedestrian safety anymore (if we did, we would impose a 50% tax on SUVs and pickups not purchased by people with honest jobs), why can’t we get this look for the nose of our Honda minivan?

Here’s a display that attributes the 1950s decline of the British luxury car industry to the British “victory” in WWII:

Turning now to the country that the British purportedly defeated, we find a great example of speaker-listener disconnect (“pragmatic failure” for the academics)… “I’ll pick you up in my BMW and we can go out for lunch” (a 13 horsepower 1957 BMW Isetta 300):

For scale, next to a baby stroller:

What Germany was able to build before it became an Islamic (as measured by hours spent on religious activities) nation (1961 Mercedes 190SL; current value about $150,000):

A Fiat Topolino and perhaps the only surviving Marot-Gardon (the owner drives it around his Palm Beach County (Lake Worth Beach) neighborhood):

Elizabeth Warren was at the event, but I didn’t get a chance to ask if I could join her on a taxpayer-funded trip to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia:

Also in the motorcycle section, a 20 lb. bicycle from 1900, no carbon fiber required and the roads back then weren’t as smooth as they are now:

Who agrees with me that the 20-year-old Ferrari 360 is more attractive than their latest and greatest?

(They seem to be available used for about $100,000. It was $153,500 in 2000, which translates to roughly $285,000 in today’s mini-dollars (i.e., it wasn’t a great investment if held from new). Our neighbor who owns a couple of Ferraris says that maintenance on the 360 is astronomically expensive due to the need to drop the engine in order to replace a timing belt that has a 3-year life. “Ferrari realized that the reputation for excessive maintenance costs was killing sales so they made the F430 a lot cheaper and easier to service,” he said. Used F430s are perhaps 10-20% more expensive than the 360.)

Let’s close with some Deplorability, a MAGA sticker on a Superformance replica and a “Black Labs Matter” explanation on an old Land Rover:

There were a ton of recent McLarens at the event, but I don’t want to include any here because they’re as common as dirt parked in the strip malls of South Florida. Also, according to a friend who owns a Ferrari and an Aston Martin (24 cylinders total!), McLarens are horribly unreliable and expensive to maintain, e.g., due to broken axles. I’m also leaving out the Triumphs and MGs because the Mazda Miata is so much better.

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Rich People in Massachusetts live like Poor People in Florida

by philg

I woke up in my friend’s $2.5 million house in Brookline, Maskachusetts in which the warmest room was 60 degrees (April 11) and stepped out into the slightly-above-freezing overcast weather to see powerlines and a 32-year-old Volvo (note the cheap chain-link fence in the background, which would never be able to get HOA approval in Florida!).

My epiphany for the day: rich people in Massachusetts share many lifestyle aspects with poor people in Florida. A partial list:

  • live in dilapidated substandard old poorly-insulated housing
  • drive cars more than five years old
  • sit on old worn-out furniture
  • probably don’t have cleaners
  • can’t afford to get repairs made to their houses (high costs relative to income)
  • no HOA to answer to
  • suffer from climate-induced discomfort due to (a) unwillingness or inability to pay for heating to 72 in the winter, (b) an entire lack of AC or unwillingness or inability to pay for cooling down to 74 in the summer
  • regular power interruptions due to above-ground powerlines
  • walking distance to marijuana store (medical-only in Florida, typically in grungy neighborhoods)
  • shop in a CVS or Target where everyday items are locked up and security guards roam the store
  • likely to vote Democrat
  • wait on lines

Note that poor people in Massachusetts often, at least in some ways, live more like rich people in Florida:

  • enjoy modern well-insulated buildings (built or gut-rehabbed recently with taxpayer money)
  • heat and cool to comfortable temps all year (heat included in the free rent and A/C affordable due to compact apartment size and good insulation (also, a lot of stuff is affordable when one doesn’t pay rent))
  • reliable underground power
  • perfect condition plumbing, electricity, and HVAC (public housing is professionally maintained and there is no cost for services)

Here’s a CVS nestled among the $2-4 million houses:

Even the $2.89 Suave shampoo is too precious to be left in the open.

A mini-Target next to Boston University ($100,000/year):

The streetscape:

Within a few steps of my friend’s expensive house, a marijuana store and ads for marijuana delivery:

After the kids have learned about the importance of marijuana, they can do a longer walk to the TimeOut Market and learn that Spring is Queer and also one should wear a mask while ordering:

Wait on lines? Here are the self-described smartest people in the U.S. waiting 1.5-2 hours because they apparently can’t figure out how to brew coffee at home:

How about the “Vote Democrat” part? On a $3 million house around the corner:

And my last photos from Boston, an outdoor masker riding a bicycle, an airport masker of uncertainty gender ID, and the airport shop reminding 60-year-old married females (a group with an unfortunate tendency to vote Republican) that they can have great sex (“romance”) by suing their husbands and becoming divorced females (reliable voters for Democrats; see also Valentine’s Day Post #3 for the sexual adventures available to AARP members with the courage to sue):

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

by philg

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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