A new commercial roofing system installed by Horizon Roofing Specialists will provide years of watertight protection for your building. And, as discussed in our previous blog post, you can expect lower summertime energy costs when your building is covered in a white, highly reflective single-ply membrane roof system.

There are additional benefits from an energy efficient “cool” roofing system.

Reflective Roofing Benefits

Reflective roofing, especially in urban settings, can help reduce peak utility power demand by lowering HVAC loads during mid-day hours. That is when the sun is most intense, A/C units are working hardest, and power companies frequently bill at higher rates due to demand.

Perhaps most importantly, increased power generation may generate a corresponding increase in air pollution in the form of smog and greenhouse gases – conditions that aggravate human health concerns. Highly reflective “cool” commercial roofing systems can help mitigate these issues by reflecting solar radiation back into the atmosphere instead of absorbing sunlight and converting it to heat.

Horizon Roofing Specialists’ preferred roofing product is the Duro-Last white single ply membrane system, manufactured since 1978 in Saginaw, Michigan. For many years Horizon Roofing Specialists has been one of the highest volume contractors for Duro-Last, having completed several successful installations in the Central Texas area. Horizon Roofing Specialists is also consistently recognized by Duro-Last for quality workmanship.

The roof system is highly reflective and Duro-Last was the first manufacturer to offer custom prefabricated components, custom made to fit each building, eliminating a significant percentage of field labor, saving money, and improving final job quality.

If the existing building insulation is sound and dry, we can typically install the new system over the existing roofing, eliminating the need for an expensive tear-off and avoiding the disposal of usable material in scarce landfill space.

PVC membrane has other inherent environmental benefits. It has a smaller carbon footprint than other roofing products; its carbon content is about 44%, compared with much higher percentage for TPO, EPDM, modified bitumen and built-up roofing. PVC is completely recyclable, and today’s PVC roofing manufacturers have processes in place to ensure that practically all scrap produced during production goes back into the manufacturing process and not into landfills.

Some commercial roofing materials, PVC in particular, can be recycled after their service life on the rooftop. Duro-Last, through its sustainable manufacturing operations and “Recycle Your Roof” program, has recycled more than 80 million pounds of PVC material into commercial flooring and other construction products.

Other ‘Green’ Roofing Systems

New environmentally friendly systems and concepts are being added to commercial rooftops across the country. Increasingly, commercial building owners are looking to the rooftop as an asset that can provide benefits in addition to keeping their facility watertight. The most prevalent of these are rooftop solar (photovoltaic) systems that enable building owners to generate their own power.

The decreasing cost of solar panel installations has created what’s known as “grid parity” in some parts of the U.S. where sunshine is abundant. Grid parity occurs when efficiency of the solar system is great enough that the overall cost of generating electricity on the rooftop is comparable to buying it from the utility.

Vegetative roofs are also growing in popularity. These systems offer a number of benefits to building owners, including helping reduce energy consumption, slowing storm water runoff, adding sound insulation, and extending the life span of the roof membrane by reducing or eliminating exposure to ultraviolet radiation and weather.

A drawback to vegetive rooftops is the maintenance required to keep plants watered, fertilized and trimmed to maintain a flourishing ecosystem.

A more recent rooftop trend, especially in urban areas, is the installation of controlled flow roof drain systems, also known as “blue” roofing systems. These devices are installed to collect rainwater on the roof, then control its release to avoid overwhelming building and neighborhood drainage systems. Some blue systems are designed to provide water for vegetative roofs.

Sustainability Considerations

If you’re considering any of these technologies, there are a couple of important points to keep in mind.

First, all of these environmentally friendly additions to your rooftop will add weight to the roof and it may be advisable to consult with a structural engineer to ensure the building structure can safely support the added load.

Second, if your current roofing system is more than a few years old, you should consider replacing it with a new one, because critical to the success of any of these new environmental systems is the roofing underneath.

If the roofing system has an issue after one of these systems is in place, locating and repairing the problem may be costly to address. A better financial choice is to replace the aging roof system before installation rather than later; the cost of the new membrane installation will be minimal compared with that of the solar, vegetative, or blue roofing system.

Horizon Roofing Specialists has the expertise to choose the correct roofing system for each of these installations and provide the applicable “overburden” warranty offered by roofing manufacturers when one of these systems is installed.