How To Find The Area Of A Roof

Area is defined as the expanse or measurement of a given surface and there are a few methods for measuring your roof s area.

How to find the area of a roof.

Once you know the roof slope multiplier for a particular slope you can use it to find the actual area of any size sloped roof with the same slope. First use your measuring tape to measure 12 inches on your large level and make a mark at the 12 inch line. Fortunately you don t have to know complicated geometry to factor in the slope of your roof. Calculating area is easy in two dimensions but nearly all roofs slope up to a peak which adds a third dimension.

Climb to the top of your roof. Hip roof is a roof with a sharp edge or edges from the ridge to the eaves where the two sides meet. So in this case for every 12 inches the roof goes across horizontally b while rising 6 inches a there s actually 13 416 inches of roof c. You need only a level and a tape measure to find the rise of your roof.

The roof area is simply 114x18x2 plus 30x18x2 giving 5184 square feet which is perfectly adequate for estimating materials. Work out the area of the remaining triangular sections. First use a ruler to draw a line from the center of the longest side of the triangle the eave to the point the roof s peak. In cases where a roof has a complex shape such as in the image to the right measuring the dimensions and areas of each part of the roof to calculate total area will result in a more accurate measurement of area.

The base width is the distance from one corner of your roof to the other at its base on the short side of your house. The calculated area is only an estimation. This isn t as difficult as you might think. The roof area for a hip end is the same as for a gable end the intersection is equivalent to a hip slightly conservative so there is usually no need to consider triangles when measuring a roof.

Next place your ladder against your house at the gable end. To calculate the area of your roof first you ll need to calculate the pitch of it. Our roof calculator uses base length and base width to find the estimated area. Be sure to find the area of any dormers on your roof as well.