Metal Roofing

1. Tax Credits
Metal roofing tax credits, available through the federal government, have encouraged homeowners to consider metal roofing. The tax credits are still available through December 31, 2010. The tax credit is for 30% of the cost (up to $1500) for Energy Star metal roofs with pigmented coatings.

2. Reduction in Homeowners Insurance
Many homeowners insurance agencies are willing to reduce premium costs for homes with metal roofing. The reductions are being given because insurance companies recognize that metal roofing can prevent damage to homes occuring from severe weather. In states that experience severe weather, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, metal roofing is known to hold up better than any other roofing type.

3. Excellent Investment
More and more homeowners have realized the long term investment that metal roofing provides. Most metal roofs come with a 50-year warranty and can last that long without major repairs or replacement. Asphalt roofs, the current leader in re-roofing, need repairing and maintenance every few years and don’t last more than 25-30 years. While metal roofing costs about double what asphalt roofs do, you’ll be saving in the long run by avoiding the need to replace your roof.

4. Staying Put
According to an article in the August 2009 issue of Professional Remodeler magazine, homeowners are less transient than a few decades ago. More and more homeowners in their 30s and 40s are choosing to stay in their homes as they age. For this group of homeowners, metal roofing is a great option as they will have the peace of mind knowing that they won’t have to replace their roof again.

5. Energy-Savings
The current economic challenge in the US has made homeowners more aware of the financial savings associated with energy savings. Metal roofing reduces energy output in two ways. First, the metal works as an insulator, which helps to keep the warm air in and the cold air out during the winter and the cool air in and the hot air out during the summer. This will enable you to save energy by allowing you to run your a/c and heating unit less. Second, most metal roofs contain a reflective pigment coating. The coating works to reflect the sun and keep a cooler home.

6. Environmentally Sound
Going green isn’t just for the environmentalists anymore. Green building has become mainstream as the significance in doing do is greater understood by the general public. Metal roofing is good for the environment. Interest in green roofing options has risen, thus metal roofing installations have risen. Metal roofing is environmentally friendly for a number of reasons. First, most metal roofs can be installed over an existing roof. This avoids the need for a roof tear-off, which yields waste that ultimately ends up in a landfill. Second, most metal roofs are made from recycled scrap metal. Third, metal in itself is a recyclable product.

7. Low Maintenance
Time is money and one of the most dreaded home repairs is fixing a leaky roof. Nowadays, people are looking to reclaim their time and less maintenance is a welcome perk of metal roofing for many. Additionally, there is no need for roof cleaning to remove the roof from moss and algae growth (as there is with asphalt roofing).

If you are in the market for a new roof, explore the advantages of installing a metal roof on your home, as it could really benefit you. As with many home improvement projects, it’s often better to invest in a good-quality, long-lasting product than in a product that will need replacing.

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Marcy Tate is a home improvement blogger at Networx. She recently worked with roofers learning about eco-friendly roofing options.

gallium arsenide

thin layer

If you can minimize significantly the price of gallium arsenide and other compound semiconductors, then you could increase their variety of applications.

Generally, gallium arsenide is deposited in a individual thin layer on a small wafer. Either the ideal device is made right on the wafer, or the semiconductor-coated wafer is break up into chips of the preferred dimension. The Illinois team decided to put in multiple layers of the material on a simple wafer, creating a layered, “pancake” stack of gallium arsenide thin films.

If you increase 10 levels in a single growth, you simply have to fill the wafer one time. If you do this in 10 growths, loading and unloading with temperature ramp-up and ramp-down take a lot of time. If you consider exactly what is needed for every growth – the machine, the preparation, the period, the workers – the overhead saving this approach presents is a substantial price decrease.

Following the experts separately peel off the levels and transport them. To achieve this, the stacks swap levels of aluminum arsenide with the gallium arsenide. Bathing the stacks in a solution of acid and an oxidizing agent dissolves the levels of aluminum arsenide, freeing the individual small sheets of gallium arsenide. A soft stamp-like system picks up the layers, just one at a time from the top down, for transfer to one other substrate – glass, plastic material or silicon, depending on the application. Next the wafer may be reused for one more growth.

By performing this it’s possible to create much more material a lot more rapidly and a lot more price effectively. This process could make bulk amounts of material, as compared to simply the thin single-layer way in which it is usually grown.

Freeing the material from the wafer additionally starts the possibility of flexible, thin-film electronics produced with gallium arsenide or many other high-speed semiconductors. To make units that could conform but still retain high performance, which is considerable.

In a paper written and published on-line May 20 in the magazine Nature (http://www.nature.com/), the team details its methods and displays 3 kinds of units utilizing gallium arsenide chips manufactured in multilayer stacks: light units, high-speed transistors and photo voltaic cells. The creators additionally offer a detailed cost evaluation.

Another benefit of the multilayer approach is the release from area constraints, particularly important for photo voltaic cells. As the layers are removed from the stack, they may be laid out side-by-side on another substrate in order to create a significantly greater surface area, whereas the standard single-layer procedure confines area to the size of the wafer.

For photovoltaics, you need big area coverage to get as much sunshine as achievable. In an extreme case we may grow enough levels to have 10 times the area of the traditional.

After that, the team plans to explore more potential item applications and additional semiconductor resources which could adapt to multilayer growth.

Shannon Combs