The Roof Tells a Story. Field Data Turns It Into a Plan.

An example of Structura View's building enclosure consulting technology.
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Property managers and roofing contractors are often stuck in the middle—clients want to save money, but no one’s sure whether the roof can be recovered or needs full replacement.

That’s where data changes everything. Moisture scans and validation processes give clients the information they need to make informed decisions.
Bringing Structura View into the process means you’re not just offering an opinion—you’re backing every recommendation with facts, reducing risk, and helping projects move forward.

Click to get a sample full roof survey report.

Transcript:

We had a client call us. They have a 1. 2 million square foot roof in Central Florida, industrial facility that’s only about two years old. They had a lightning strike on the roof and reported that a large area had issues from the lightning strike and had been repaired, and that the insurance company said from their inspection that there weren’t any other known issues or damages, and from another roofing contractor, the same. He wanted to be sure that there wasn’t any other residual problems from one, the lightning strike, and then two, from the recent storm damage. We hired us to come out and do a drone-based thermal roof scan to see if we can efficiently and effectively map or locate any potential moisture in the roof. That roof ended up being really challenging. One thing that’s really important to know about two-year-old TPO roofs is that they’re very reflective. Don’t absorb a lot of heat and temperature throughout the day as the sun beats down on it and we experience solar load. We don’t see a lot of temperature change in some of the moisture, especially if some of the moisture is very light. For example, there’s not a lot of moisture.

It’s not heavily saturated. It’s just a little bit of moisture that’s retained in the roof. Due to complications, we had to do three scans on that roof because it was so large, and our temperature window was only 15 to 30 minutes each time that we were out there. So we would do the south section, the central section, and then the north section, and then we would do three different stitches to tie all the data together. In the end, what we ended up finding was over 120 thermal anomalies were observed throughout the roof system, in addition to the area that we knew was already damaged from a lightning strike. The owner came back to us after reading the report and asked us a lot of questions because there were already two other reports that said they didn’t find anything, and our report was showing that we suspected moisture in over 120 other different locations throughout the roof, so he was confused. My response to him was simple in that thermal imaging is studying temperature data on a roof. It may be moisture. There may be things going on, but the simple answer is that we suspect it to be wet and we need to get on the roof to further test and verify to dial in exactly what we think is going on here.

We got up on the roof with the roofing contractor and we perform moisture meter testing to help study all of those areas that we suspected to be wet and other areas that we suspected to be dry, just to help put more data together to tie that information together. After walking the interior of the building, we were able to deduct that because of the whitening strike, it caused caused the roof to catch on fire, which caused fire suppression system, your sprinklers inside to go off. And after you study the thermal anomalies on that roof, you notice a lot of the thermal anomalies directly correlate with where each one of those pipes and where those sprinkler heads were. After reasoning and deduction and seeing where there was only one active leak in the building out of the 120 plus locations that we found, we ended up concluding that the moisture had gotten in the roof because the sprinkler system went off and it was forcing water up into the roof from under the deck as opposed to water getting in because of failures on the surface of the roof. Where that ended up being valuable to the client is they were able to take that data to show to the insurance carrier, and instead of only having an insurance claim on, call it, a 300 to 500 square foot area.

They were then able to have a claim on a larger area when you combine the moisture calculations on all of the anomalies that we found. That value to them in understanding the condition to share with the insurance to get the money and to make sure that proper remediation and repairs were implemented to help make sure that they continued to have a good foot to stand on when it comes to maintaining that roof for a long period of time. Reality, that roof is worth millions of dollars, both now and in the future. It’s important to make sure that the condition of it is sound from the beginning to make sure it lasts its sold in warranted lifetime.

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