Shouldn’t be a problem – I’ve emailed you with details on usage.

Shawn

please let me know.
thanks!

To answer your questions, you do need to do a little weeding on ecoroofs. For the most part, if the plants up there can survive the dry summers (shallow soil doesn’t retain much moisture), you don’t really need to do anything if you don’t want to. You do however need to make sure you don’t have trees or plants with woody roots growing because they can damage the waterproof membrane underneath the soil. So its probably a good idea to give your ecoroofs a weeding once a year. With Harpoon House, we have two ecoroofs, the lower one is living space that we will be spending time in anyways, and the upper one will have a ladder so that we can get up to it.

For the leaking, as long as you do some pretty basic maintenance like weeding once a year, ecoroofs should last longer than conventional roofs. Our waterproof membrane is the same system that typically goes on the roofs of things like warehouses and office buildings, but because we are covering it with soil, it doesn’t get exposure to things like sun and hail that could damage it over time.

I hope that helps.

1) Do you have to go up on the roof to do a bunch of gardening? How the heck do you get up there?

2) In a city like Portland, don’t you get a lot of water that just sits in the dirt on the top of the roof? Isn’t this going to leak after a few years?

Thanks!

Eco Roofs are often flat, but work on a slope too. The basic idea is the roof serves as a foundation for dirt and small plants. The soil/plant layer does a couple of things: it insulates the house extremely well, provides rainwater management (the plants drink it up), and reduces the home’s carbon footprint (first by eliminating the petroleum used in shingles and second by capturing CO2 through photosynthesis).

The city of Portland has a cash-incentive eco-roof program that actually pays you for a portion of the install cost. I also just discovered an eco-roof blog run by the city. You can see it here.