Sun or snow, safety comes first!

By Emma Peterson. 

Learn how TRA Snow and Sun keeps homeowners and contractors safer every day. 

TRA Snow and Sun was founded in 1996 to bring European snow safety products, such as snow brackets/guards and snow fences to America. Today, they’re still manufacturing and educating people about the same products, though they’ve developed quite a bit in the last 25 years. Recently, TRA hosted an education seminar in March 2024 at the Associated General Contractors (AGC) of Utah’s brand-new training space. Mindy Dahlquist, the business manager at TRA headed up this training. She explained, “We had 76 attendees, I think all but one of them were roofing contractors, whether it was owners or installers, a couple of project managers.”  

The first part of the session was an overall explanation of the different aspects of snow retention. This included information about when a snow retention system is needed, what type of sheathing is best and other aspects of a roofing project that are affected by snow. Mindy explained the reason for starting with a more general overview, “There's no codes or standards for these people to be able to reference, so we covered things even those who had already installed our products may not have been aware of, like our design rules and why there are going to be expansion gaps.”  

From that point, they did a deep dive into individual products, such as deck mounts, clamp-ons and brackets and the technical specifications for each. This is where AGC’s new space was very beneficial for the training as they have a lab space. Mindy and TRA Snow and Sun were able to set up roofing areas in there so that the trainees could work with the actual products and ask questions as they came up.  

At the end of the day, attendees of the event walked away with new knowledge and resources. TRA distributed resources like color chip samples and video brochures about snow retention products to help attendees continue their learning. The entire training showcased TRA’s dedication to keeping people safe with snow retention, as Mindy described, “We had a lot of people that said most manufacturers would charge $100 a person to come to this and the fact we offered it for free showed them that we really care about our product being installed properly.”