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Ensuring the Best Performance for Commercial Roofs

How old is your roof right now? Given that a commercial roof may have anywhere from a 20-year lifespan to a 50-year lifespan, it’s likely that you didn’t inherit your commercial roof when it was new. What’s more, no matter how badly your roof was treated before you started working, the success of your job depends on making your newly inherited roof last as long as possible. Fortunately, resourceful facility managers can make a huge difference in the longevity and performance of a commercial roof. If you’re punctual about roof maintenance, inspection, and record-keeping, you can restore an older roof to its former glory and even keep it in perfect condition long after its projected lifespan has run out. Learn how to develop a strategic roof asset management plan that will help make scheduling and budgeting for maintenance easier and lead to better decisions. Understanding Your Roof Upon receiving control of your roof, you immediately need to know a number of things about it. It starts w...
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Resilient and Reliable: Creating Sustainable, High-Performing Roofs

Creating sustainable roofing has always been a great way to prove your merits as an eco-conscious organization, but there’s far more to it than that. With traditional asphalt roofs lasting a mere 20 years or so, eco-friendly roofs are about more than just doing your part for the environment—they’ll save you money in the long run as well. From green roofs to solar panels, here’s how sustainability makes a great investment for your next commercial roof. The Grass is Greener on your Green Roof A green roof—which is to say a roof on which vegetation is deliberately encouraged to grow—is a complicated yet beautiful addition to any commercial roof. Whereas a traditional roof may have two or three layers, green roofs have up to seven: membrane, roof repellant, insulation, drainage, filtering, soil, and the plants themselves. While the aesthetic result is often worth it—especially in urban office buildings in which the roof is actually visible to the surroundings—there are more benefits to a g...
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Creating Climate-Resilient Roofing Designs for Commercial Buildings

The climate is indisputably changing. We notice it in things like hotter summers, more intense storms, and longer hurricane seasons. What we notice, your roof notices too. Depending on the location of your building, you’ll find that extreme weather will impact the design of your roof – and what’s more, extreme weather is likely to keep on getting more extreme. This means that in order to maximize the lifespan of your roof, you don’t just need to build: you need to overbuild, anticipating the ways in which climate will change in order to meet a moving target. How do you create resilient roofing in the wake of a changing climate? Climate Concerns Make Resilient Roofing into a Challenge Although winters may be getting milder overall, a warming planet leads to more moisture in the atmosphere – so when snow happens, you’ll see more intense blizzards. This has obvious implications for roofing – but some of the implications are less clear. For example, you might see occasional heavy blizzards...
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Safe Access Over Rooftop Obstacles

Your rooftop is crowded. As far as your rooftop is concerned, your workforce may need to navigate next to steep drop-offs, over ledges, around cable runs, and past skylights. Putting a foot in the wrong place can have negative consequences, if you’re not careful. As a commercial building owner or manager, it is your responsibility to provide a safe rooftop access system, safety equipment, and safety training for your maintenance workers, contractors, and building personnel. Here’s what you need to know. Provide Safe Rooftop Access Systems or Suffer the Consequences They say that “every safety rule is written in blood,” and the safety statistics for rooftop accidents bear this statement out. In the entire industry of building construction and maintenance, rooftops are one of the largest sources of accident, injury, and lawsuits.   Between 1992 and 2009, falls from rooftops made up 33 percent of falling-related fatalities within the construction industry   OSHA requires building...
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Where Roofing is Concerned, Sustainability Starts at The Top

Commercial buildings are getting larger. Of the 55 percent of buildings built between 1960 and 1999, the average size is 16,300 square feet. Meanwhile, the buildings built since 1999 have an average size of 19,000 square feet – an increase of almost 3,000 square feet. What does this have to do with sustainable roofing? Bigger buildings mean bigger roofs. A one-story warehouse with an average size of 19,000 square feet will need more than 19,000 square feet of roofing material to cover it up. That’s a vast amount of surface area – surface area that’s usually flat or at a very slight pitch. In other words, it’s a surface that makes a perfect foundation – flat and barely occupied – for sustainability. If you found an extra 19,000 square feet of space in your building, you’d use it for something, right? And since you can’t really use a roof as a loading dock or a packing and sorting facility, your best bet is to use your roof to pay for the rest of your building. Using the right materials,...
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Creating Climate-Resilient Roofing Designs for Commercial Buildings

The climate is indisputably changing. We notice it in things like hotter summers, more intense storms, and longer hurricane seasons. What we notice, your roof notices too. Depending on the location of your building, you’ll find that extreme weather will impact the design of your roof – and what’s more, extreme weather is likely to keep on getting more extreme. This means that in order to maximize the lifespan of your roof, you don’t just need to build: you need to overbuild, anticipating the ways in which climate will change in order to meet a moving target. How do you create resilient roofing in the wake of a changing climate? Climate Concerns Make Resilient Roofing into a Challenge Although winters may be getting milder overall, a warming planet leads to more moisture in the atmosphere – so when snow happens, you’ll see more intense blizzards. This has obvious implications for roofing – but some of the implications are less clear. For example, you might see occasional heavy blizzards...
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4 Proven Products for Commercial and Industrial Roofs

Building managers must contend with various obstacles and elements that can wreak havoc on commercial rooftops and any equipment stored on them. Each aspect of the roof—from the membrane to the roof edge—requires regular maintenance and inspection. Without the right rooftop equipment, however, your workers will be unable to do their job without endangering themselves or the commercial roof that they’re trying to protect. In order to ensure the safety of your workforce and the longevity of your roof, facility managers need to invest in these four proven products. By investing in rooftop supports, access walkways, equipment platforms, and more, you’ll be able to dramatically extend the lifespan of your roof—recapturing your initial investment several times over. Rooftop Equipment Platforms A lot of equipment goes on top of the commercial roof because it’s not easy to fit anywhere else. Generators, HVAC pumps, satellite dishes, and even telecom antennae are all commonly placed on commerci...
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