
S-5!™ ColorGard® is the best buy on
the market! Better holding strength, better color retention,
user-friendly installation—this all equates to higher cost, right?
Wrong.
Everyone wants better quality—as long as it also costs less. Well, with
S-5!™ ColorGard® you can have your cake and eat it, too! When compared
with other fence type systems on a cost per foot basis, ColorGard®
wins, hands down—even though it is several times stronger than most of
those systems. When compared to individual cleat type units,
pound-for-pound of holding strength, ColorGard® costs much less—yes,
even less than the plastic parts. It even costs less to install!
Roofing contractors find the ColorGard® system so easy to work with
that they charge less to install it than they do for installing any
other competitive product on the market today!
(And to make things even easier for you and your distributor, we now offer an online
ColorGard® calculator to help you design your snow retention system.)
Placing Cost in Context
Snow accumulations on sloped metal roofs can pose significant danger to property and life. These accumulations can succumb to gravity and avalanche in a catastrophic manner–harming landscape, gutters, adjacent roofs, vehicles or even passersby. A properly designed, quality snow retention system can mitigate the danger and nuisance of sliding snow. However, it is important to realize that not all snow retention products are created equal. When selecting and specifying a product or system, it is critical to accurately compute the roof’s design service snow load, and to choose a system that will provide the protection needed to withstand that calculated load. The good news is that there are tools out there to perform the system design and make comparison shopping much easier–often with surprising results regarding cost!
Plastic snow guards are sometimes chosen because they are assumed to be the lowest cost solution. In reality, they are often the highest, actually costing several times more than a system that lasts longer, installs quicker, looks better, prevents damage to the roof and eliminates messy glue residues. Because today’s premium metal roof finishes are similar in chemical composition to “Teflon,” chemical bonds like tapes, glues and adhesives provide only temporary and unreliable solutions with a service life of just a few years. The low holding strength of the adhesive also diminishes over the short service life of the bond. In the best case the strength of a stick-on part is only equal to the peeling strength of the paint to which it is stuck.
Case Study

LEFT: Plastic snow guards at $26.63 per linear foot.
RIGHT: S-5!™ ColorGard® at $8.51 per linear foot.
A gabled roof project with a run of 60 feet, slope of 2/12, design roof snow load of 30 psf, and 160 feet of total protected eaves. Utilizing the calculations recommended by one manufacturer of adhered plastic snow guards, the job requires 960 plastic snow guards, 138 tubes of adhesive and three boxes of panel wipes for a total material cost of over $4,200; not to mention extensive labor costs.
By comparison, the same roof, when calculated using the S-5!™ online calculator, results with one row of ColorGard® system consisting of 242 components, designed and lab tested for the specific roof profile and costing only $1,361 (suggested MSRP). The ColorGard® looks beautiful, matches the roof color perfectly, protects the panel manufacturers’ warranty, installs much more quickly–any time of the year, lasts as long as the roof itself, and actually costs much less! With ColorGard® you really can buy the best for less!