The Similarities Between Commercial & Residential Roofs, And Why They Matter

Hi, this is Mark. I’m with Kingdom Roofing. We’re out on a commercial project today and I thought I would take a few minutes because there’s a lot of similarities between commercial flat roofs as you can see here and the flat roofs that you find on the back of your house covering your lanai porch.

Because if I gave you a quote and you have a lanai porch on the back of your house, you’re going to use the same material that we use on this commercial roof. So let’s go ahead and take a look.

We’re a GAF Master Elite contractor. So we’re going to be using GAF products.

This is a two-ply system as you could see right here. We have a peel-and-stick base sheet. So what happens is, is we pull this off. This rubberized membrane glues directly to the roof deck like you see here.

Then what happens is you have a big shingle. This is a rolled shingle. They call it “rolled modified” and this has a peel-and-stick back. It glues right down on top of there. This is your two-ply modified roof system.

Now I will tell you that on this commercial project, they’re doing a three-ply, which means that there’s actually going to be another layer in between here and that gives you a 20-year warranty going with the three layers. Most commercial projects do three layers and residential do two layers just like you see here.

So let’s go over here. We will take a look. This roof was completely flat and what you’re seeing here is this is stacked IsoBoard or a dense insulated board. We do what we call a quarter inch per foot. Same thing on your flat roof. We start out at a half inch at the edge here and every foot that you come back on the roof, it increases the thickness a quarter inch per foot. Not only now does this give it the roof a nice pitch, but it also gives it a dense insulation factor here, probably about an R-20.

The sun heats up those asphalt sheets. It penetrates that heat down inside the house. It makes your air conditioner run. So they put insulation in between the ceiling and here. So if we pull this up, there would probably be about that much insulation.

It’s not very much especially on flat roofs. When you have a house with an attic and you can fill it with insulation, really code in Florida, most residential homes should have a foot of insulation and we find that they have three to four inches. So very inefficient. So these Iso dense insulated boards give that insulation without having to blow it in or roll it in and it makes the roof become pitched now instead of flat. Residential roof, you could put that taper down if that roof is holding water.

If it’s not holding water, you can use the two-ply system and go direct to deck. So let’s take a look. We’ve finished this half of this building and now today we’re going to come back. We’re going to install the taper package on this side of the building and then of course three-layer roof.

So you have your – base sheet goes down first. This roof, because it’s commercial, will be a mid-ply, which is another layer and then we will put the granulated cap sheet on the top as a three-layered roof system. So let’s go ahead and take a look around. We have three buildings here.

All of this that you see stacked on the roof over here, this is going to be all of the tapered roof and you could see as we go all the way down, we’re doing all of the roofs on top of this building here. So anyways, we really look forward to working with you. If you want to get a free quote, please give us a call at Kingdom Roofing. Thanks a lot and we will talk to you again soon.