Building owners and facility managers often experience unscheduled capital expenditures due to roofing repairs. Many of these repairs can be avoided by developing and following a scheduled maintenance program for the life of a roofing system. But even with stringent adherence to a thorough maintenance program, the decision to repair, recover or replace a roofing system will have to be made at some time within or towards the end of the expected service life of the roof.
Many issues, such as the type of system currently in place, cost estimates, construction schedule, occupant requirements, and long- and short-term use of the building all have to be addressed as part of this decision, and the appropriate decision must be addressed on a building-by-building basis.
The first step (before beginning the decision process) is to estimate the remaining service life of the roof. This estimate is derived from factors that include water infiltration, moisture trapped in the underlying insulation, aggregate movement across the roof, bituminous membrane slippage or embrittlement of single-ply membranes.
A professional roofing contractor can investigate the existing system and answer these questions, as well as comment on any related code or technical issues. The roofing contractor may also eliminate any false or misleading assumptions, such as incorrectly attributing water infiltration to the roof system when the water is actually entering the building through the adjacent exterior walls.
Each day this week we will dive into a different aspect of this decision process, including repairing roofs, investigating moisture, recovering roofs, and replacing roofs. Please check back for updates, or connect with us on Facebook and/or Twitter to be alterted to new blog posts.
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Good post Randy. I look forward to the rest of the articles in this series.
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