If the building is properly designed, you should not need to shovel it off. As mentioned already, roof rakes are useless on high-eave buildings, and shoveling on them is a good way to die. Roof rakes are also a nice way to touch a powerline, so avoid that if using one. It's 20 feet from my shop roof eave to the ground. I will never shovel it. I will never have it shoveled. I took care of it at the ordering phase - it's speced for a 50 lb (per square foot) snow load, and per the truss company policy that's been further beefed to deal with the situation where one side blows clear (the unequal loading is harder on the truss than even loading). I think it added a whopping $100 to the truss order over the 40 lb minimum for this area.
That's about 9.6 inches of water or 2-1/2 feet of dense snow. Figures vary on the "dense snow" number, because snow weight per depth varies both as it falls (light and fluffy .vs. heavy and dense) and after it lands as it compacts. That's 3-5 feet of fresh snow per most numbers, upwards of 8 feet for the lightest types.
Doesn't do you much good if the building is underbuilt right now. Here's an old document from MN, where I'd think the design loads would be higher, but evidently not, at least for ag buildings.
One practical approach that doesn't involve running around on the roof is to add bracing inside the building. For best effect this should be done in consultation with an engineer, or at least with enough engineering insight to avoid making things worse by concentrating stress at the wrong point.
As for "needing a certified architect to design for it", I doubt it. You need an engineer, and the truss (or building) company has one or more of them on staff - what they need from you is a number to shoot for so they can give you a price. What I did was to look up the number that's minimum code for my area and add 10 to it - you can probably do the same, use a larger fudge factor, or have them give you a price on 2-3 different numbers to compare them. For the engineer, it's mostly pulling standard designs off the computer unless you have a very different building, and even if you do, it's still mostly punching different numbers into the computer to get the design/estimate. Then you will know what it costs to build to local code, overbuild, or seriously overbuild. If you have no local code to start from, you can ask for what they would design by default for your area, and two numbers larger than that by whatever factor gives you warm fuzzies. As a point of reference, the snowier towns nearby have a code minimum of 70 PSF.
This post was edited by Ecnerwal at 18:12:25 01/25/10.
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