S-tile

Eagle Roofing Products, a concrete roof tile maker, puts it this way on its high barrel product page: “High Barrel roof tiles, otherwise known as S-Tiles, are semi-cylindrical shaped and the most traditionally recognized of all tile profiles.” InterNACHI's course, Mastering Roof Inspections: Tile Roofs, Part 1, sorts the same vocabulary another way: “Medium-profile tiles may be shallow clay-pan tiles or S-shaped tiles. High-profile tiles are typically barrel tiles.”

Read together, the two sentences do not agree. In Eagle's, S-tile and high barrel are two names for one tile. In InterNACHI's, S-shaped tiles and barrel tiles sit in different bands, medium and high. One is a maker naming the profiles it sells; the other is an inspector-education body sorting tile shapes for people who look at roofs. This page prints both attributions and does not pick one.

A third document sets the names aside. The FRSA-TRI Florida High Wind Concrete and Clay Tile Installation Manual defines tile profiles in its glossary by rise and rise-to-width ratio, and its profile definitions do not use the words S-tile or barrel. The name on its own does not say which of that manual's categories a given tile falls in.

InterNACHI's course describes three ways tiles meet within a course, the row of tiles running parallel to the eave: “Tiles in the same course may overlap, such as barrel tiles, or they may interlock, such as S-tiles, or they may butt, such as flat clay tiles.”

Interlocking, in the course's description, means edge profiles made to fit together so tiles stay aligned and help seal against moisture intrusion, and the course places interlocking tiles typically at low or medium profile. That is consistent with where it filed S-shaped tiles. Barrel tiles, in the same description, overlap instead, and overlapping tiles may be laid as a two-piece pan and cover.

Eagle's 2017 article on choosing a barrel tile uses the name once more, for its lower option: it calls its medium barrel “a more modern version of the S-tile and sometimes referred to as an M-tile.” Eagle's two barrel heights, with the figures it gives for each, are set out under barrel tile.

The FRSA-TRI manual's glossary sorts tile by how far it rises. Its medium profile entry covers tile rising more than half an inch with a rise-to-width ratio of 1:5 or less, and both its medium and high entries are taken “measured in installed conditions”, on tile already laid.

So a tile sold as an S-tile can be described two ways at once: by the maker's name, and by where its installed rise lands in the manual. The band at the top of that scale is explained under high-profile tile. Which profile a particular roof carries is answered by the maker's product literature for that tile or by a roofing contractor, and not by the name alone.

TRI Alliance's Roof Maintenance Guide gives this shape a line of its own: on high profile S tiles, a walker distributes weight on the high points of adjacent tiles. Eagle's 2025 article on walking a tile roof gives the same instruction for high barrel tiles such as its Capistrano profile, telling a walker to “distribute your weight with the heel and toe on the high points of adjacent tiles.”

Notice the word TRI uses. Its guide calls S tiles high profile, which lines up with Eagle's naming rather than with InterNACHI's medium band, one more sign that the name travels differently from document to document. Eagle gives its reason: “stepping in the wrong spot can lead to cracked, broken, or displaced tiles.” TRI frames its caution as preventing damage to roof tiles that may void a warranty.

These lines describe a technique for the shape. They say nothing about cleaning chemistry or pressure. Whether a soft wash suits a curved tile, and what the tile maker publishes about cleaning it, is answered in is soft washing safe for barrel tile.