If you have a metal roof that’s leaking, you may not realize that there are several options you can consider to repair or recover your roof beyond a simple re-roof or replacement. There are four main options that can occur including Single Ply Overlay/Metal Retrofit, Complete Replacement, and Metal Roof Coatings.

We will discuss all the options belong and hopefully let you make your own informed decision on what to do with your leaky metal roof.

Single Ply Overlay or Metal Retrofit

Just as it sounds, there’s a single ply material that is applied on top of the metal roof to act as another barrier to the elements. The concern with doing this is that the installation will require thousands of nails being drilled onto the surface of the overlay to adhere it to the existing metal roof surface. Likewise with a metal retrofit of installing a metal roof over an existing one, you’re still having to drill thousands of holes for this to adhere.

This means that this roof previously didn’t have a lot of holes and now suddenly has thousands of holes creating thousands of potential pathways for water to penetrate inside the building. Additionally, a single ply overlay can change the water weight distribution and snow load distribution.

For this to be effective, the owner of the building would also have to do a structural upgrade to uphold the added weight of installing a single ply overlay.

Complete Replacement on a Metal Roof

This is the option that comes to mind most of the time when people are experiencing leak issues on their metal roof. While in some instances this is absolutely necessary because the roof is at the end of its life span, it’s not always the case.

The challenges that can come with doing a complete metal roof replacement are the cost, disruption, and duration. Even compared to our most premium roof coating, the cost of replacing a metal roof is still at least 4x what you would expect to pay for coatings.

The disruption is the next factor to consider. The tear-off the old roof is loud and disruptive for operations below. Particularly for a food service manufacturing plant, it’s hard to expose food items to the open elements while still trying to maintain a safe food production environment.

Lastly, the time it would take to completely re-roof a metal roof is significantly longer because of the drawn out and laborious process. (Which by the way, more labor means more expense for you)

Again, while it is necessary in some instances, oftentimes a complete re-roof is an unnecessary and has several drawbacks to a building owner.

Roof Coatings on a Metal Roof

A roof coating is a fully adhered system that will cover any exposed seams and make the roof “water tight”. Specifically regarding our Triton 2k product, it can withstand baseball-sized hail, is impermeable (can withstand ponding water indefinitely), Class A fire rating (self extinguishing), and much more.

What many people don’t realize is that even being significantly cheaper than a re-roof, this product offers a similar warranty of 20 years with a No Dollar Limit (NDL) from the manufacturer and could theoretically be re-applied and re-warrantied indefinitely.

Summary

While Armour Roof Co. offers both roof replacement and roof coatings as a service, we encourage building owners to first consider roof coatings due to the price point, installation, and warranty because it truly can be the “low hanging fruit” from your metal roof leak problem.