Choosing the Right Roof Coating
If you have a home with a flat roof or live in an older mobile home the simple fact is that at some time you are going to have to reseal you roof with some form of roof coating in order to eliminate any chance that it is going to leak rain into the inside of your house. This is a fairly common occurrence as flat roofs tend to dry out and leak over time. The trick is to make sure that you reseal them before the coating wears off or dries out to the point where it is going to be a problem.
The typical roof coating is damaged by the weather and the environment. The sun causes the coatings to dry out and then in the winter the ice and snow cause the coatings to crack and peel. Very few of them ever seem to last as long as the manufacturers claim they will partly due to the chemicals that are caught up in the air and the rain. This acid rain is very destructive to the sealant and only the best ones seem to hold up.
With so many different types of roof coating available to use making the right choice can be a challenge. Before you head off to your local supply store you need to arm yourself with some basic information that you can give them so that they can recommend the right type of coating for the roof you are trying to cover. Most importantly, they will need to know what type of roof you need the covering for, such as tin, plastic, wood, rubber or tile. You will also need to be able to tell them the approximate condition of your roof.
If there is already a roof coating on your roof you should try and identify what type of coating it is. This way you can make sure that the new coating you are buying is compatible with the old one and no adverse effects will occur during or after applying the new coating. Among these adverse effects are blistering, poor adhesion and separation of the two coatings into one unusable mess as the different chemical react against each other.
Before you apply the new roof coating you need to determine how much surface preparation is required. In some cases all you need to do is sweep of the loose debris and apply the new coating. Other coating requires you to completely remove the old coating before applying the new one. If you do not follow the instructions closely, you may end up worse off than you were before you applied the new coating.
As an industry leader American Weatherstar offers a complete line of roof coating for most types of roofing. These coatings are designed to completely eliminate leak while helping to cool the building and carry long term warranties against leaks on most roofing substrates. Their product line includes acrylics, butyls and silicones along with single and multipart urethanes along with all the peripheral products you need to finish the job.
