By doing preventative maintenance, shouldn't I expect to have no leaks on my building?

Photo of a TPO roof replacement project with the sun reflecting on the white commercial roof

As roof management specialists, we get a lot of questions. But one question is very commonly asked. The question being, "By doing preventative maintenance, shouldn't I expect to have no leaks on my building?"

The answer to that is no, you can't just expect to have no leaks because you do preventative maintenance. Just to try to clear up this misconception, preventative maintenance is not preventing you from getting leaks, it is preventing your roof from prematurely failing.

Now, can a preventative maintenance help with getting in front of leaks? Sometimes. But the objective of doing preventative maintenance is to avoid premature failure to that roof system.

Think of it like your vehicle. When you purchase a car, you have to do preventative maintenance items along the way, in order for your car to get you 100,000, 200,000 miles, something people even get more than that. But you have to do things like change the oil routinely, do your tune-ups when you need to do your tune-ups, do those items that are going to help you get the longevity out of your vehicle so that it doesn't prematurely fail. That is the purpose of preventative maintenance.

But just like a vehicle, you still might have to change some tires, you still might have to change the brake pads, you might have a couple of issues within the engine that have to be worked on from time to time, throughout the life cycle of that vehicle.

But, at least by doing the oil changes and doing your tune-ups on that vehicle, you've at least avoided making sure that you are going to have premature failure. Same thing with preventative maintenance. If you do not do preventative maintenance on your roof, you are pretty much ensuring that you are not going to get the full life cycle out of that roof that you should get, and the longevity out of that asset.

Hopefully that helps clear up the misconception. Contact us at sales@roofoptions.com to learn more about preventative commercial roof maintenance.

Jeff Broderick

Helping the commercial real estate industry not waste money on their roof by providing full lifecycle management control.

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