An IRE tradition: New product release from Leister

By Emma Peterson.

Meet the Vacuum Plate, the newest roofing product from Leister and your best friend when working with membranes.  

If you’ve been around at different events and conferences this trade show season, you probably have seen our incredible crew running soundstages and hosting panels. But did you know that we also often have a team exploring the trade show floor and hosting interviews in our customers’ booths? They’re a bit harder to spot as they’re constantly on the move, so we wanted to highlight some of the interesting conversations they had! In this interview from the 2025 International Roofing Expo (IRE), Lauren White spoke to Dave Nordentoft, the roofing products manager from Leister!  

Last year, Leister wowed attendees of IRE with the release of their new VARIMAT roof welding machine. This product included a variety of technology and improvements including a monitored welding assistant and the Leister Quality System (LQS). At this year’s show, they continued the tradition of announcing new products at IRE with the release of their Vacuum Plate! This new product is designed for use on the roof to check for leaks in roof systems. It utilizes a battery for power and is incredibly portable, making it perfect for checking seams, T-joints, potential puncture locations and other hard to reach places.

Dave shared a bit of how this product was designed internally, saying, “We've been offering this kind of technology before, just not in the roofing industry prior to this. Our plastic welding work involves us in many industries. In this case, we were using vacuum testing for the geosynthetics industry using it on membranes that are below landfills and tunnel linings. So, when it came to developing the Vacuum Plate, we took that technology and developed it to be oriented specifically for roof type membranes.”  

The main thing that changed between the geosynthetic product and the roofing one? The amount of pressure that was used. Dave explained, “The roofing industry uses thinner membranes that can't take the kind of vacuum pressure that those other membranes require. So the Vacuum Plate is optimized to be able to be used for thinner gauge membranes, it could maybe even be used for swimming pool liners and that sort of thing.”

Check out the entire interview with Dave to learn more about the Vacuum Plate and Leister’s other product offerings!