Pattern of Troubling Comments by Building Inspector

This nitwit is the chief building inspector, who I suspect is either protecting a friend who is a roofer, or who has come under fire by local roofers because we have taken the largest customer in the city from them.

I am compiling some of his comments in case I need to go to the city manager but would appreciate your thoughts. Am I overreacting? He has cost us about $40,000 in the last month by insisting roofs be torn off that don't need to be torn off. Some of the comments he has made that show prejudice or outright ignorance:

* A foam roof won't work here. I don't like foam roofs, I don't think they work anywhere.

* I can bounce a little on this deck and feel reverberation, and that means it's too heavy and the roof has to be torn off.

* My job is to provide a level playing field for roofers.

* These blisters indicate moisture in the insulation (a blister by its nature is airtight).

Right now we are tearing off a 320 SQR BUR with gravel that has a concrete deck, no insulation, and a few blisters. The 250 lbs/SQR of loose gravel would weight 2.5X more than the foam roof on a recover, so weight isn't a factor. I tried to explain to him that if a blister is still airtight, it cannot be allowing moisture to get below the roof.

The inspector knows that requiring us to tear off every roof hurts us, big time. We lose our cost advantage and the profit margin is much smaller. So far he has required us to tear off every roof, but "his" inspectors who work under him are more reasonable and have not asked for any tear offs.

Of course one risk of complaining us that he might call "his" inspectors in and tell them to start being more strict with us.

Tim,

Thanks for the polite reply.

The point I was making was your inspector was fueled by the same rumors as many roofers around the world are.

On the blister issue the first line of my proposals were

Cut out and repair all blistered areas.

Moisture scans are cheap.

When you go to the meeting ask the Bad Inspector if the roof to was dry in his suspected but unproved area. When he answers yes ask him how the moisture he suspected but did not prove could turn to vapor with spray foam and a white coating on it?

Roofs are usualy designed to breath from the underside.

Sounds like you should've waited to start the job until you won the battle, instead of starting it already defeated

Well said, Tom.

The inspector has just gotten worse by the day. He now has d that one of our customers has lots of money therefor he can afford to tear his roofs off. Fortunately, our customer is also an attorney and when we told him what the inspector said, he hit the roof.

The tear off job is now 50% done and it is a crying shame the owner was forced to pay an additional $75,000 for the tear off. The roof we're tearing off is less than 1/2" thick, over concrete deck and we have not found 1 spot of wetness. It is the kind of application SPF is meant for!

His fellow inspectors think he is a clown and have asked me to sit down with his boss.

Speaking of moisture An average water molecule will spend 9 days in the atmosphere, 2 weeks in a river, 10 years in a large lake, 3,000 to 5,000 years in an ocean, 10,000-100,000+ years underground, and 10,000 to 1,000,000+ years in an Antarctic ice cap. B) :) :) B) Deep Down In Florida Where The Sun Shines Damn Near Every Day

OMG LMAO

I now have Foam Roofs down close to 50 years.

I fought Metro/Dade almost every day.

When I first posted on this board I had to fight tooth and nail with about every poster and Tim RoofGuy was most of the band leader.

Guess what?????????? The Building Inspectors SOLE job is to make sure the roof is done to building code, not to make an opinion on what type of roof he likes.

There are specific tests done before, during and after the Roof Instalation. I know them by heart as I wrote the First Protocol accepted by the FRSA and Metro/Dade after Hurricaine Andrew.

Are my wayback posts all gone??????? I answered all those questions way back and how I delt with the building departments.

If you need any help, email me, I am retired, not dead,

Oh, LOL anyone got any of my old Posts on the price of Gas?

In part, flat commercial roofs are looked at much differently that pitched shingle roofs. The owner of a flat roof doesn't want to hear from it or about it. He wants it to set up there and never create drama for him.

I'm convinced that a high percentage of flat roof owners could have a roof that leaks like a sieve, but if it doesn't rain for 5 years they would worry about it for 5 years.

Won't argue SPF and BUR with similar life spans, but with a cost difference of about $0.30/sq ft between a 15 year TPO and 30+ year Fibertite, the payoff isn't there to pay for the new roof in 15 years unless you're top dog in a great Ponzi scheme.

When I hear "no" to Fibertite over TPO, it's almost exclusively due to one of the following:

1: I won't be here in 15 years and I don't care. 2: It's not my money, and I don't care. 3: I won't own the building for that long, so I don't care.

Among people that care, I have about a 90% hit rate. The other 10 percent goes to better sales people or an owner that thinks things like: If the warranty is the same, I'll save the money, or I know the name (Insert Firestone, Carlise, Manville) and I want to stick with a name I know, or any a lot of other possible reasons.

I think this concept is also where roofers have missed the "TPO Revolution." I don't like TPO, won't install it, think it's an inferior roof. Why is it so popular? In part because - even though the roofer hasn't figured it out - the building owner can do the math and realize that keeping money in his pocket for other investments, quickly overcomes the advantage of a roof that lasts longer.

Alba, you aren't talking about an SPF failure, you're talking about an installation error. Closed cell foam will not absorb water that's why it's called closed cell. If the surface is allowed to break down, yes UV will degrade the foam rapidly.

Your comment is pretty broad. I have seen a lot of SPF roofs that lasted a long time, that's why we got into SPF.

Roofers often get hung up on what they think is important and ignore what is in their customers' best interest. Just take 1 hypothetical out of many possible:

BUR Subject Property: 25,000 sq. ft manufacturing facility Existing roof: BUR with 1" Perlite insulation 2.78 R-value (very common here, many have no insulation at all). Average energy bill: $3,500/mo Cost of roof including tear off: $125,000

SPF Subject Property: 25,000 sq. ft manufacturing facility Existing roof: SPF 2" R-value 13 Average energy bill: $2,100/mo Cost of roof with no tear off: $75,000

Average annual cost of roof including energy bill assuming 15 year life. BUR: $42,555 SPF: $25,533

Granted, some SPF roofs are installed improperly and don't last 15 years, but I've seen a ton of BUR that are the same. The NRCA did a study a couple decades ago that said the average 20 specified BUR last 7.5-9 years. I have also used conservative numbers - some say an SPF roof can save 50% on energy bills. In fact Texas A&M University says their 7 million sq. ft. of SPF roofs paid for themselves in 4.5 years in energy savings. Here is the article: http://www.ircroof.com/uploads/media/2014/04/Texas_A___M.pdf

When you factor in opportunity costs of $17,022 per year that the building owner gets to invest in something else, we're talking about a lot of savings with the SPF roof. In round numbers, if the building owner can get 7% ROI by putting the savings to work doing something else, in 15 years that $17,022 becomes $449,455 with compounding.

That's nearly a half a million bucks the owner has in his pocket at the end of 15 years, so even if the SPF lasted only 1/2 as long, it's still a better investment.

Blisters indicate moisture. when water turns into vapor expands 1500 times in volume. I haven't seen a SPF roof over that hasn't failed yet. A couple of years back this customer had some roof leak issues on one of his properties.it was a ballasted SPF on a top of a BUR.It had blisters everywhere. I cut a few core samples in different areas and there was water between the roofs. I told him there wasn't much I could do because the spf was sucking water like a sponge all over the place. He was like I understand , do what you can . Ok , we moved the rocks back , tried to blow the dust as well as we could and spread a 5 gal pail of some elastomeric coating.2 men at $60 an hour for 4 hours , plus $200 material he gets a bill for almost $800 and the leak didn't stop. he was pissed.

I'm not sure what you don't agree with me about. I think you just took a couple of paragraphs to say what I said briefly in point 1.

Although there is certainly quite a lot of opportunity for water to enter a blister over the many years of formation. I've "X"d out a lot of blisters of the years, and can't remember one without water in it.

That being said, I'm not disagreeing with you. I've just seen way to many liberties taken. With the SPuF, you best ere on the side of caution.

I disagree with both of you on how blisters become blisters and how they affect the roof.

Blisters don't happen by magic over time. A blister is almost always the result of moisture introduced at the time the roof was installed thru wet material, or going over a damp surface, or by leaving voids in the inter-ply moppings which can have a slight amount of moisture because if humidity in the atmosphere at the time of application.

Over time the adhesion breaks down as the moisture interior of the blister turns to vapor during the heat of the day.

A blister by its nature cannot introduce moisture below the bottom surface of the blister, which is unusually between plies or between roof layers. If it were not 100% watertight on the bottom, it couldn't inflate. Blisters are always watertight on the bottom - until somebody damages it to cause that to change. Physics demands that. So since it is watertight on the bottom, the cure for an unbroken blister is very simple: Cut off the top layers and dry.

Virtually every manufacturer or retrofit systems specifies how to open, dry, and reseal a blister - most by cutting an X thru the top. The reason they specify this is because they know that unbroken blisters are always watertight on the bottom.

Tom, we are new to working with inspectors but I sure hope you are wrong. Leaving things up to the personal whims of the inspector is ripe for abuse.

I don't disagree that SPF leaves a lot of room for errors. I don't try ti tell the building owner what he should do - his goals may be something I don't understand. I give him a host of options, hopefully he choose one of them. He may not want to spend the money for a 30 year roof, and in this part of the world he's smart enough to know that his roof likely will not go 15 years without damaging hail that requires replacement.

As for the blisters....That's how they got there....MOISTURE! Of course there's H2O in there!

Here's my experience:

1. I'd say "every" blister I've ever cut, but let me choose instead to say 99.9%, just in case there was one one somewhere that didn't, has had water in it. While blisters can form from asphalt voids, they aren't "blisters" when the roof is finished, they become blisters over time, and during that formation, take on water.

2. Water and foam do not mix.

3. Foamers around here don't like to tear off roofs.

4. Most foam roofs around here that are installed over existing roofs fail.

5. I've never witnessed a failed foam roof that was installed over a bare, properly prepared deck. Even when the top coating has completely failed, the roof remains water-tight until the foam deteriorates, as long as the foam remains free of blisters that form cracks in the system.

6. "Price advantage" usually means "Lesser roof quality". If there is any moisture present in the existing roof not being torn off, I would say that statement holds true.

7. I don't know the condition of the roofs you are talking about, but based solely on my experience in the northern climate of Ohio, I would tend to side with the inspector if there is any sign of moisture in the system. And as pointed out above, blisters are such an indication.

We do not tear off every roof that we do, but we do tear out all wet sections of every roof, regardless of system being installed. I think that serious consideration of the substrate condition and need for a tear-off is more important with foam than with any other system due to the fact that the existing roof is the sole source of roof system attachment and the negative effects moisture play in the ultimate success of the system. I've not only observed that over 30+ years of roofing, but as a foamer, learned it the expensive way.

Generally speaking what I have seen is that guys who do nothing but foam, often don't do very good roofs, and guys who offer a whole range of products, including foam, usually do good foam roofs. The problem being that foam, like any roof system, is not the solution to every situation and too many people sell it as such.

What else I found as one of those guys that offered foam and traditional systems was that if I did the foam roof to the specification that I believed was necessary to achieve a 30+ year roof system, there was no price advantage to foam, and it was only truly viable if there was another consideration that made foaming a better option.

I also found that equipment that was not used on a VERY regular basis became difficult to maintain on ratio.

I just never found the comfort level with the system to keep my equipment busy. That's why it's for sale.

So it's just back to that same old summary I've seen here a hundred times by different people, which gives credibility to dad's old saying "A good roofer will make your roof water tight with asphalt coated toilet paper, and a bad roofer will screw up even the best product.".... Done right, foam is great, done wrong, foam is as bad or worse than anything else. Moisture control is one of the biggest keys to "right".

my $0.02

Local bldg. officials are responsible to enforce "minimum" standards. Long, long ago we inserted language in our std. contracts acknowledging only "written" local bldg. dept. applicable code revisions/addendum's. The bldg. official can still do/require whatever they want, however it may protect you concerninbg your contract/agreement with your client.