IT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU HAVE A ROOF MAINTENANCE PLAN
But even more important is that it is properly prepared. It would be a huge waste of time to prepare a plan for your roof without making sure you are preparing a roof maintenance plan that will work for your roof. But how exactly do you develop a plan that will help and prosper your roof and keep you from wasting your time?
Three Things to Consider When Writing Your Roof Maintenance Plan
In order to write a successful roof maintenance plan, you need to write down how often you will inspect your roof, what parts of it you will inspect, and what your course of action will be for failures or potential failures identified. Before you can determine how often you will inspect your roof, you need to consider three crucial aspects of your building.
Consider Your Building’s Environment
The environment around your building has potentially the greatest impact on it of all factors. If you experience frequent severe weather, large temperature swings, or are close to a chemical plant that may be depositing chemicals on your roof, your roof will likely experience common wear and tear sooner than buildings in more favorable environments.
Consider Your Building’s Size
If you manage a 10,000 square foot building, you can probably inspect the entire roof in a day and be very thorough. However, if you manage a 1,000,000 square foot building, that could take weeks to properly inspect. If your situation is closer to the latter, you may need to consider performing several small inspections throughout the year that eventually become a complete roof inspection. Perhaps you inspect one eighth of the roof every 30-45 days. This way, you are only taking up a day at a time, but are still getting it all inspected.
This seems like an obvious warning, but many building owners forget this simple step when preparing their roof maintenance plan. Because they don’t properly plan, they are incapable of carrying out their roof maintenance plan and give up. Their roof then gets neglected and it fails before it should.
Consider Your Building’s Contents
What type of inventory, or human capital is in your building on a daily basis? Are you storing $3 million pieces of equipment that can’t be exposed to moisture? Do you have 3 daily shifts with 500 people each? If either of those can be said of your building, you better make sure you are frequently inspecting your roof and that it is in tip-top shape.
On the other hand, are you storing low-value, non-perishable inventory? Is your warehouse empty most of the year? Perhaps you only need to inspect your roof once per year before the employees come back in to work. A good example of the seasonal work could be a fireworks store that may only operate 3 months out of the year. However, if you are still storing fireworks in the building, you probably need to keep checking in on the roof.
Conclusion
To write a successful roof maintenance plan, you must determine how often you will inspect your roof, what parts of the roof you will inspect, and what you will do if you find any failures. In order to determine how often you will inspect your roof, you need to consider your building’s environment, size, and contents before making a decision. If you don’t consider these aspects, you may be over or under-inspecting and either of those mistakes can cost you money. Without a doubt, when there are lives involved, being overly cautious and over-inspecting is the right mistake to make of the two. You certainly don’t want to under-inspect if there are lives at risk.
