Do Green Roof Failures increase with Roofing Manufacturers?
Non irrigated extensive Green Roof
In the last two days I visited four of my projects that are between 14 years and 1 year old.
Each of these Green Roof has an own interesting history and with the exception of the “cozy” Green Roof, each of the extensive green roof host over 25 and 40 plant species in excellent health.
For these amazing, inexpensive and resilient green roofs a special thank to all who participated!
None of them was ever irrigated and the oldest was fertilized the last time 10 years ago. All of them require hardly any maintenance (2 hours per 5,000sf / year). One Green Roof is maintained only once every 3 years.
In contrast:
I was on one roof that was installed and maintained by a roofing company with materials from a famous roofing manufacturer. This roof is basically going down the drain because of incompetence, sloppy work, and inappropriate materials.
This roof came with a costly single source warranty that –as always – doesn’t cover anything of the green roof. The cost for this worthless application was around 25% higher than a fully functioning Green Roof from well trained gardeners.
This is one of many projects around the Nation where I am questioning myself whether roofing manufactures and roofing companies should work in the Green Roof field. As a matter of fact in last decade 90% of roofing manufacturers offered Green Roof Systems that consistently under-perform or that are not maintained properly. Actually most of these manufactures changed their systems and approaches to Green Roofs more often than they changed the management of these multi-million Dollar corporations.
While many of these manager focuses on how increase revenue and some of them how to fix the problems with Green Roofs their quality of the waterproofing and craftsmanship of their installations went down. Striving for more revenue is not a wrong thing in general but when this is done on the backbone of the Green Roof industry and our all prospect clients it is more than questionable.
As client you have to figure out whether it is more important to make unknown stockholder happy or yourself.
I don’t fall for roofing warranties and sales forces with nice brochure
