Just as scientists drill into the icy mantle of Antarctica and extract ice cores, commercial roofers can drill into your commercial property’s roof to remove a sample of every layer of your roof down to the roof deck. Why do this? Just as the scientists can tease out clues about earth’s atmosphere, temperatures and climate over thousands of years, so too can roofers learn about the exact makeup of the roof protecting your business.
What’s In the Core?
Rather than peel back entire square yards of your building’s roof, a core cut takes a representative sample of the top surface, subsurface, insulation and more. The commercial roofer with expertise at reading the core cut can find out:
- If your roof contains hazardous materials like asbestos, flammable solvents and adhesives, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
- Total number of layers to the deck
- Wet insulation or subsurface layers, with water pooling and moving by capillary action through your roof
- The exact composition, density, weight, and thickness of each layer
- Slope of your roof — was it accomplished through tapered insulation or by constructing the deck itself to slope?
- An approximate age of your roof
Good to the Core
A core cut which goes down to your roof deck gives you a glimpse of the deck far more easily than you could get trying to work up from within your building. Is the deck steel, poured-in-place concrete, prefabricated concrete panels, or wood sheathing?
Up to the Job?
One answer a roofing core cut provides can relieve you of worry. Is your current roof up to current building code? Is the existing roof actually an original roof, with a new roof laid over it? If so, most building codes do not permit “reroofing” by removing only the top layer.
The layers tell the story not only of the roof’s history but its possible future. A keen-eyed professional roofer can look at that core and give you a good estimate on your roof’s life span. This allows you, for the cost of the core work, to budget roof replacement on your terms.
Vanguard Roofing is your local, trusted commercial roofing expert. We can perform a roof core cut on your commercial property whether it is in New York, western Massachusetts, or Bergen or Passaic counties. Contact us today to learn more about the hidden history of your roof.
