Top Tips LIVE From a ROOF! - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with John Athanasion and Mike Negrete of APOC. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

Intro: Hello. My name is Heidi Ellsworth and this is Coatings Talk from CoatingsCoffeeShop. This is the very first time that we are going to be live on a roof for a Coatings Talk webinar, and thank you for being a part of it and joining us. I'm so excited. This is being brought to you by APOC, and we are here to talk about the tips and tricks of what to do as you get ready to restore a roof or roofing overall. First of all, a few housekeeping. This is being recorded and it will be available on demand within the next 24 hours. We are so excited for you to share this amongst your friends, talk about it. Perfect, perfect webinar for that first timer or anybody who has a lot more experience and who has been on the roof for a long time.

Also, be sure to ask questions. We are going to be live on the chat, so ask questions, make comments. We are also live on LinkedIn. Yeah. So make some comments there. Let us know what you think. We are very excited about this first-ever Coatings Talk from the roof, so let's get started. First of all, this isn't about me, this is about the experts on the roof. So I am so excited to have John and Mike here from APOC, and they're going to give us a tour of the roof. So let's start with some introductions first. John?

John Athanasion: My name is John Athanasion. I'm the Technical Manager for the Los Angeles nascent. And we have Mike here, my assistant, he's up from the Central Valley. Hello, Mike.

Heidi Ellsworth: Mike?

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:01:46]

Heidi Ellsworth: And guess what I didn't mention. How cool is that? This coatings talk is going to be in both English and Spanish. Mike is going to be giving us tips and tricks along with John in English, but then also summarizing it all in Spanish. First time ever. We have a lot of firsts going on today here on the roof.

John Athanasion: Yeah. And we welcome all the newcomers.

Heidi Ellsworth: All the newcomers, and we are so excited.

Mike Negrete: [00:2:00]

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes, yes. Okay, so let's get started. And what we want to start with is back here behind us is the hatch. This is where we all walked into when we came up. So John, let's start with you. As we're talking about coming onto the roof, when you first come on, what are some of the things that you should be thinking about safety-wise?

John Athanasion: Now the first thing you got to think about is when you get up on the roof, especially when the sun's out, it's going to be very bright. If you're on a TPO or a coated roof, it's very white. You're going to be snow blinded, should have a good pair of glasses. Naturally, your first step out of the hatch, ladder, whatever, it may be slippery. You should have some kind of a granulated surface, walk pad or something. That way your first step is not a slippery one.

Heidi Ellsworth: And sometimes even the simple things, right? Closed toes on shoes.

John Athanasion: Absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth: Right, to put it in there.

John Athanasion: Naturally, we should always have work boots on when you get up on the roof. And that is another thing, generally thinking you'd have a hard hat and your vest.

Heidi Ellsworth: All of the safety gear. And then we want to start with that because there's nothing more important than safety.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:03:37].

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent. Okay, so we want to start out, and Mike, I want to start with you on this. You were sharing with how important it's to know what you're walking on, right? I mean there's a lot of roofs that are in such bad repair, you could be in danger. So when you first come up the hatch, you want to really kind of understand what kind of system you have going, right?

Mike Negrete: That is correct.

Heidi Ellsworth: That's correct. Can you maybe show us the hatchback here and talk a little bit about the roofing system that we're walking on right now?

Mike Negrete: John, do you want to mention it to them? John, this is a metal. You can tell them about the metal roof and I'll just-

John Athanasion: What he's showing you right here is, this is actually the metal structure here. They have the metal decking and then they would've a three-inch ISO board on top of that and then they came back with a hot built-up roof on top of that, which would be a granulated cap sheet.

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent. Once you know what's on here and it's going to be safe, but there's also other things that you need to do, right? As in testing for moisture?

Mike Negrete: Correct. We also have the testing moisture or we have a cord cut equipment that you need. And when you do that, try to do it on the highest surface so you can be safe. You can patch that area. So that's the two points that you have to look before you decide what kind of system you can put down.

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent. And do you want to just go over real quick the type of roof that we're on and the core test in Spanish?

Mike Negrete: Sure. Okay. [foreign language 00:05:20]

John Athanasion: Naturally, it's very important to do a core test on these things to determine if you have one, two or three layers on them before you actually determine what system you're going to use.

Heidi Ellsworth: And we also, as we're still standing here, we're looking at where you're going to set up, right? Your equipment, your buckets, whatever you're doing is one of the things that you need to think about.

John Athanasion: Absolutely. And on this particular roof, we've got high parapet walls all the way around. This is actually a four-story building, so naturally you'd have to find out where we could set up a crane to actually load the material here. What is the safest place? Will you have to cone it off so you can keep the cars away, this and that? These are all things you determine when you're on the roof. First off [inaudible 00:06:39] when you pull up on the job site.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:06:49].

Heidi Ellsworth: And we also need to do to set, before we get started, a pull test, right?

Mike Negrete: Correct.

Heidi Ellsworth: So Mike, let's see how that's done?

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:07:18].

Heidi Ellsworth: So if you can walk us through that as you're doing it. What kind of product are we doing the pull test with

John Athanasion: This is APOC number 264. It's a white acrylic mastic, and this is what you use on any of your acrylic systems here. What Mike's going to do is put the polyester in there, you embed it into the polyester and then do a light brushing on top. You're going to leave about two or three inches out on a tail. So when you come back in two or three days [inaudible 00:08:06] you can [inaudible 00:08:11]. Naturally, if it pulls [inaudible 00:08:22] onto that membrane. We have a pull tester here that you'd actually come back and mount this on. You could give it a pull. Naturally, sometimes you might not have that. You can just give it a pull. Between two and four pounds of pressure is all you need to determine whether it's going to bond or not.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:08:42].

Heidi Ellsworth: And I want to make sure everyone knows if you have questions, we are taking this on the chat, so in the chat, on LinkedIn, ask us questions, English or Spanish. In Spanish, we will translate them and we will get those back to you. So we'll make it. But any questions on all these tips and tricks? This is the stuff that [inaudible 00:09:50] how everybody starts to [inaudible 00:09:57] roof. So, let's go look at some of the details [inaudible 00:10:02].

John Athanasion: They should actually take a picture of it when they're doing a pull. That way you can document this in your contract.

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent pictures, documentation the whole way through.

John Athanasion: Absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth: Definitely. Okay, let's go over here. We're going to walk. Now, we are coming over here because we have some details that have not been completed yet that Megan is following and we'll have... And by the way, we have our great camera team here, Megan Ellsworth and Brooks Morgan.

John Athanasion: Now this is a perfect example of why we're having a failure here. We have cracking all along here. Naturally, you can come up here and put a little seal [inaudible 00:10:34] around this [inaudible 00:10:44] thing and call it a day. But generally we've done in the past, you should use polyester fabric on any type of repair that you're making because none of the products that are made now has asbestos in them. They're all manmade products. So without the reinforcement they may not last very long.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:11:39]

Heidi Ellsworth: [inaudible 00:11:39] up this wall. Can you talk about what it's going to take, some tips and tricks on making sure that these are being sealed appropriately before the restoration?

John Athanasion: Absolutely. And as we walk over here, we can look at the things that everybody would overlook. We have cracks in the wall. These can be intruding water right behind your base flashing or your counter flashing. Now when we came here to do a restoration, the proper way to do it, we would take all this stuff off. That way I can run my plies all the way to the top, three course them off and then reinstall, get rid of that. And then we got [inaudible 00:12:23] naturally they've been using mastic [inaudible 00:12:27] is a metal deck with insulation. So all the flashings they use, they're all led. Naturally, they've got some sealant here that's cracking down here. This is really not the problem. It's up here at the top. They need a collar, a clamp and then sealant at the top. They use tape here, which works fine. Even this stuff here though, when you make a repair, if you see cracks in it should chip that out before you make that repair. That way you can make it effectively and then use a fabric to three course it in.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:13:31]

Heidi Ellsworth: And Mike, we are in California and so in California there are building codes. There are regulations that are not always the same as the rest of the country, but still very important. And one of them is the necessity to encapsulate anything that's led. Correct?

Mike Negrete: Correct. Actually we can encapsulate the land or asbestos also. It depends, but yeah, we definitely can do that with our products.

John Athanasion: On our restorations [inaudible 00:14:00] you do have [inaudible 00:14:06] we can actually encapsulate [inaudible 00:14:09] abatement. So using a restoration we can actually encapsulate it in asbestos roof.

Heidi Ellsworth: There's a tip and trick right there. That is excellent, gentlemen.

John Athanasion: There's another thing here. We've got a lot of walk pads up here.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes, we do.

John Athanasion: Now when you're doing a restoration here, a lot of guys, they'll just come up and run right alongside of this thing and call it a day. These particular ones have been installed with hot asphalt so there's no voids underneath. But generally speaking they would put five dots of mastic on this thing and set it in there. What happens is water gets up underneath these things, migrates underneath there and it rots the roof from within. So when we do a restoration, we like to come in here with our four-inch polyester and three course in the entire perimeter. That way there's no water intrusion.

Heidi Ellsworth: I love it. And a lot of times people forget about that.

John Athanasion: Well these are the things that'll come up in this. It's over here, but they won't even think about taking it up and that's where the problem is.

Heidi Ellsworth: Exactly. Mike.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:15:08].

John Athanasion: If you want to step back a little bit, we'll talk about how these things are raised up here. Naturally you see these are all on metal platforms here. These are very large heating and cooling units. Naturally, up underneath this thing, we're using a water-based product here, so you're not going to have to worry about getting up here with hot tar and getting burnt and stuff. So you could actually get up here on your cons and knees with a roller and get this thing waterproof without having to worry about the hot tar. In past years we'd be up here trying to mop underneath there and it's always dangerous.

Heidi Ellsworth: Well, and one of the things that I think as we talk about application also is the difference between rolling and spraying. This is a very busy roof.

John Athanasion: This is a very busy roof, absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth: So not really probably the best place for spraying, but if you were going to do some spraying, there are some precautions, some tricks that you should be doing.

John Athanasion: Absolutely. No matter what you're looking at, if you've got skylight or any type of... Most of the buildings have new air conditioning units and they surely don't want to see overspray on them. So it only takes a couple of minutes, wrap some plastic around them. On the AC units, you really don't have to go that high. Even if you do a couple wraps around the bottom, that's where the overspray is going to hit. Skylights are very important to wrap because of the fact that I can wrap them in about 10 minutes or two hours to clean them. It's so much easier to wrap them in plastic and be done with it.

Mike Negrete: Okay. [foreign language 00:17:39].

Heidi Ellsworth: And every roof has to deal with ponding. Not every roof, I shouldn't say that, but a lot of roofs have to deal with ponding. And how do contractors do that? What are some of the solutions? So let's walk over here and you can tell us about that.

John Athanasion: Absolutely. Mike will give you an insight on this roof slope here.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes.

Speaker 3: Okay. This is type of a light concrete roof slope. It comes in five gallon buckets. It's a 50 pound bucket. It's real simple to get it prepped. You mix it with water, you definitely put lines and make sure that you have enough slope and just port it and let it sit for maybe 5, 10 minutes, start working on it and then we can come back after it's dry and cured. And you can either go with coating or go with a complete system over it.

Heidi Ellsworth: And Mike, as you are evaluating this, when you first come on the roof before you put the roof slope down, what are some of the things that you're looking for? Obviously water and why is that bad? But also are there other indicators that you should be looking for to know that this needs to be something that needs to be dealt with from a ponding?

Mike Negrete: Well you'll see that the system wears out, and when you pressure wash you will notice where the water is doing damage. And that's when you mark with the orange markers and just mark your areas that you really have to address.

John Athanasion: And before you actually power wash, a lot of times there'll be a stain where the water has been sitting for days.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:19:22].

John Athanasion: So naturally you can actually use strings and we have some strings here. They would run blocks of strings. That way you can determine the height that you want to go to get your height here to taper it back to this point here.

Heidi Ellsworth: Another trick. There we go. Okay, talking about water. Water is the most important thing that you control it, mitigate it, get it off the roof the right way. So let's go check out the drains that we are working on.

John Athanasion: Absolutely. Correct. We've actually had the workers up here in the past and they actually did the details on this drain. So you can see what it looks like. And this would be prior to putting the restoration on, we'd work the drains and naturally the drains are the most important part of the roof and they should be addressed first.

Heidi Ellsworth: So down back here you can see where the drains already restored and maintenance service?

John Athanasion: Now this is a compression ring drain. What they did is they pulled the drain ring off, they cut out the entire drain itself and they put down... Was there a piece of lead in there?

Mike Negrete: It was a ProTac rubber.

John Athanasion: So we came back and then we prepped it out with mastic. We put our 12-inch ProTac in there, which is a self adhered membrane with a polyester reinforcement. We used that as a base, put that down first. Once that was down we laminated one ply of polyester in the acrylic there. And naturally when you do your drains, you want to put that ring on there before it dries up. You want to get it while the ceiling is still a little soft. That way you can squeeze it down and get a good seal.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:21:34].

John Athanasion: And you can do these repairs with virtually anything, the acrylic or you can use the asphalt emulsion or you can use the base for the armor base for the [inaudible 00:22:05] as well.

Heidi Ellsworth: Now while we're standing here too, prepping the roof is so important. I mean that's for any roof restoration. You want it prepped and perfect. Talk to us a little bit about these flashings? They look very pretty.

John Athanasion: Naturally. And like we talked about over there, you want to clean them up before you start this here. We actually came back and three coursed this in with a polyester fabric, which would be all the way around the base and around the collar of it as well. And that's used in the 264. Our white flashing seal we call it. It's a poly-mastic.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:23:02].

Heidi Ellsworth: And if you have any questions, we're going along, we are taking questions in the chat, we're also watching LinkedIn or any questions or comments in there. So please let us know as you go along. I don't know about you all, but I think this is totally cool.

John Athanasion: One of the things I like to highlight, when we're doing coatings, nobody said roofing was pretty until we started painting them. So when you come up on a roof now all of your penetrations, everything you do, you want to bring them to the same height. If it's a six-foot pipe, you don't want to do six foot, get them all at 18-inches. That way everything is uniform when you're done, because now we're trying to make a pretty picture.

Heidi Ellsworth: And it looks pretty. It really does. So let's talk about again prep. As we're prepping this roof for restoration, you have Mike, right? Prepping the roof, understanding this area.

Mike Negrete: Okay, well what we're doing here is when we're on the roof, when we're roofers, we always talk about squares. One square is a hundred square feet. So what we're doing right now, we're going to mark it with cones and measure it. This is a measure wheel that we used. So based on that one square, that's what we need to do. Depends on what kind of system we need.

John Athanasion: We're talking about a silicone here. When you gradually wrap it down, you can control where your buckets are going to be [inaudible 00:24:32]. 10 by 10 right now if we were going to go at a two and a half gallon ratio on the silicone, we'd want to go 10 foot by 25 and you would get two gallons back there. If you wanted a two and a half gallon spec, you'd go 10 by 20 and that'd be a bucket that would give you two gallons per square. Mike, show them one square right now. Naturally we have our marking paint here, and if I was getting ready to load a roof, I'd come up here to wrap it out so I'd know where to put my buckets when the loaders got here.

Heidi Ellsworth: That is key to efficiency and labor savings, right? Really having a plan for the roof.

John Athanasion: And naturally when you got it, if it's a big roof and you're going to do a silicone system. If you put all the buckets of base and silicone in the way, it's going to be in the way. So if you have a capability of doing it, you put all the base up first, get that done and then load your silicone buckets.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes. Perfect.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:25:58].

Heidi Ellsworth: Now when you were talking about setting up the buckets, I think we had a comment in there about flipping the silicone buckets.

John Athanasion: Absolutely. The silicone naturally anything liquid, when you go to Dunn-Edwards Paint, you give the invoice and they give you the experience there. So naturally all [inaudible 00:26:17] before they're used. But if you were actually loading the roof there, you could flip them upside down, that would bring all the solids down in there and get you to premix.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:26:46].

Heidi Ellsworth: So we saw the solution over here for ponding. We saw making sure that the drains are all right, but we all know that moisture is deadly on a roof in the wrong place. And so let's go over, I think this part of the roof is pretty fascinating and see what is so important about prepping and understanding where the moisture is and fixing that before you go on. So let's head that way. Absolutely.

John Athanasion: If you want to swing back here and show the shot of that there, what we want it to look like at the finished product there. That all the way to there. That way everything is nice and uniform. Naturally when you do your final walk with the building owner or consultant or a management company, they look at all these details, they want to see everything on. When we walking by this here, they should have a protection panel underneath this here. You've got a heavy weight here with a metal frame. The metal frame is a hotspot on that roof so it actually should have an expert over there.

Mike Negrete: He left this.

Heidi Ellsworth: Okay, so can you talk to us about this part of the roof? This is different than where we were. What went on here and why is it different?

Mike Negrete: Well the reason they did these two platforms over the existing roof, I believe they put some antennas and there was a lot of weight. They just try to reinforce these two areas but they didn't do it properly. What they did is they put plywood over the existing cap sheet and they went over with torch down, which is they left a lot of blocking water. So we have a big issue which is the water just comes through here and it travels between the two membranes and the plywood and did damage into the plywood.

John Athanasion: They want to [inaudible 00:29:33] find out what the real problem is.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:29:33].

Heidi Ellsworth: So now what is the plan for this? What are you going to do in order to fix it?

Mike Negrete: First of all, they have to tear off the whole existing top plywood in this top roof and then find out what's under here. If they did any penetrations with screws, nails to hold the plywood down and then we'll go from there. We'd terminate what we're doing. [foreign language 00:30:12].

John Athanasion: And once they have this off they'll have to determine whether we can actually do a restoration on it or will they have to put a complete new membrane here. Chances are they'll have to put a membrane because I'm sure the plywood underneath the existing roof is bad.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. And as you are looking at this, I'm just curious, when you first came onto the roof with the contractor and you looked at this, what are some of the things people should be thinking? For me, as I walked up here, I noticed I walked up onto a little bit of a platform. It feels kind of squishy.

John Athanasion: Squanky. Absolutely, yeah.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. What are some of the things you're looking for?

Mike Negrete: The first impression, when I came up to this roof, I started walking in front of feeling the area and I saw that soft area and I thought it was insulation. That's what's really important to do a clear cut and find out what's really under that roof, under that bad area.

Heidi Ellsworth: The facility managers and the contractor who's working on this, when they see this type of... When they realize what you're doing to prep the roof to really understand it, to me that is a huge selling point to be communicating with the building owner, right?

John Athanasion: Absolutely. Well naturally who came up here with a building engineer or the owner and started cutting into the room, he would probably freak out. But we actually found the problem.

Heidi Ellsworth: And took care of it.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:31:53].

Heidi Ellsworth: So as you're looking across, I mean, there's a lot to be done. What are some of the key things in this area that really people should be aware of?

John Athanasion: Well naturally when you've got a new air conditioning unit like we have here, the air conditioner or the electrician will come up here and set that flashing in there. That's a great temporary fix, but it's not a permanent fix. So you'd either come in there with three course it in with any of the products and or our incredible tape, that way you'd have a proper flashing and it would actually last. This here sealant will probably last one or two years and they'll create a leak there. Also, they've got these pads right here [inaudible 00:32:49] put that insulation back so they can seal it to that pipe and not do the insulation. Insulation will run out and [inaudible 00:33:28] this is very important. In a lot of cases they [inaudible 00:33:28].

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:33:28].

Heidi Ellsworth: Okay, so we are on. Hopefully there's no pause that we are still here on. Okay. So we'll be back. We're just going to keep going.

John Athanasion: Yeah.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes, we're just going to keep going. Okay, you know we're on the roof. So this is where this happens. And we have a lot of loud sounds around here. So let's go ahead and one of the questions I had gentlemen was as you were... We talked about bringing the buckets up, getting everything positioned. How about tools? What tools should people be thinking about that are important to have on the roof? And then sometimes people may be forget and then they're having to run to the trucks or whatever. What are some tips around that?

John Athanasion: The funny thing is through the years of roofing, you've had your knife, your hammer, this and that. Now we're doing restorations with polyester fabric. You have to have a good pair of scissors and you should have a good brush. Talk about some of those things when we get over the other side there. But you definitely need a softest of brush. You need your roller and a pair of scissors for sure.

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent.

John Athanasion: Had all the good stuff to protection on the side.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes, protection.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:35:10].

Heidi Ellsworth: So also one of the things that I'm noticing around here too, these parapet walls, is there anything besides where we talked about the cracks within the walls? What kind of the details along the bottom that you're also going out underneath over to the roof edge or to another parapet wall? Just a second. Okay, we're going to pause just for one second and we will bring it back.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:35:52].

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes.

Megan: They can still hear you-

Heidi Ellsworth: Oh, okay, great.

Megan: Okay, we're back.

Heidi Ellsworth: Okay, we're back. And great. Any certain point Megan that we should be starting at?

Megan: Let's go from here. Those flashing.

Heidi Ellsworth: So for all of you, you may have heard us once already, I apologize for that. But we want you to see what we're talking about. So we're going to go back to the air conditioning and the fluid piping that goes on and how that works. So here we go. Let's talk about these details.

John Athanasion: Actually when they put the new unit in here, came back, either the electrician or the air conditioning contract and they'd set that flashing down in some ceiling. [inaudible 00:36:57] temporary, but it's not the long term issue [inaudible 00:37:04] want to talk about is this insulation they've got here. They've got [inaudible 00:37:25], but they did not take the insulation out until it seals that pipe. So it happens through the aging process. This'll deteriorate and quad will start intruding here and go down into this flashing. The proper flashing for this is [inaudible 00:38:06].

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:38:06].

Heidi Ellsworth: Excellent. Now that we have all of our flashings, everything's looking beautiful on the roof, all the penetration, the ponding, the drain, everything. We're going to go over and see what it's going to look like when they start doing the full restoration. Let's walk that way.

John Athanasion: As you can see, there's a lot of detail on this [inaudible 00:38:56]. It's really going to be time-consuming to get through all this stuff. So bid a project, really got to answer how much time it's going to take to get up underneath all this stuff.

So we did a sample repair here. This is a one square area. What we did is we came over the existing cap sheet roof. We installed one ply of polyester. Now we laminated the polyester in four gallons of the 300 asphalt emulsion. Lightly brushed it in. When you're doing an acrylic coating, you want to brush the polyester in and get some penetration, but you want to leave the scrim there. That way when you put your acrylic on, it has something to attach to. This particular [inaudible 00:39:44] it has the four gallons of emulsion, one ply of polyester and this is one coat of acrylic. Naturally when we tie everything back in, it'll have the second coat on top, but it takes two coats of acrylic to give you your final 24 dry mills is what we're looking for.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:40:07].

John Athanasion: Let's walk over and talk about that counter flashing.

Heidi Ellsworth: So I do have one question as we're walking over here to look at this counter flash. Real quick. When you're trying to decide between a one or two-ply system, what are some of the considerations with the roof and with the system that you-

John Athanasion: More importantly the age of the roof. If you have a lot of granular loss on the roof, you would want to go with the two-ply system. I like the two-ply system. You've got a full 20-inch overlap rather than four inch overlap. It's just a better system all the way around. But naturally there's a cost difference.

Heidi Ellsworth: Right. There's cost and it depends. And so really you have to, again, the age of the roof but also be working with the building owner.

John Athanasion: Absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yes.

John Athanasion: The questions you ask, if you're dealing with a property management or building owner, are you going to keep it for the long term or you just trying to get by for the short term?

Heidi Ellsworth: Exactly.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:41:58].

Heidi Ellsworth: So talk to us a little bit about this and this?

John Athanasion: Naturally we've got this flashing here and this particular one has a [inaudible 00:42:13]. Now that naturally been here for over 10 years, that [inaudible 00:42:13] is dried up and it's no good anymore. We will have water proofing on there and you wouldn't even know it. So you can scrape out the old caulking and put new caulking in or you can come back and three course it in like we have here. Using our 264, you can either use a two inch or oral polyester three quarters that in. That's a permanent fix. That's going to be something you won't have to worry about for years.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:43:08].

Heidi Ellsworth: So when we're trying to decide what products to use, and you've mentioned a number, whether it's silicone, acrylic, asphaltic, whatever it may be, that's a question that I think a lot of people have. What's what.

John Athanasion: It truly is.

Heidi Ellsworth: So why don't we walk over and let's talk a little bit about the different types of materials and some of the tips and tricks with those materials when you're using them on the roof?

John Athanasion: Absolutely. And one of the things that you should always think about is when you put a lot of people [inaudible 00:43:55] put silicone on, you first [inaudible 00:43:56]. I would come in and restore it with the emulsion and polyester first. You'll get your 10 or 15 years out of this if you decide to go with silicone on that, and now you come back, now you've got a warm call to your customer. Hey, it's 10 years, 12 years time to do a re-coat. Then you could put a silicone on there and/or just another coat as well. But when you put a silicone coating on the first roof, if you don't put any reinforcement in there, your next coat when you come back in 10 or 15 years is extremely expensive. It's a special formula with a special primer and so it will stick. So, these are the things you got to consider.

Heidi Ellsworth: That's-

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:45:19].

Heidi Ellsworth: Let's go look at some of those products gentlemen.

John Athanasion: Let's go over and we'll talk about those. Here. First thing I'd like to talk about, this is showing the different products here. And naturally you can see the silicone is a lot slipperier. When you get up on these roofs, if it's an existing silicone, if you have a bottle of water or a little spit, put it on there, it'll get slippery. You can see the acrylic is a lot. It doesn't have the same sheen. So that's the way you'd be able to tell. A little water, you'll be able to see that this is silicone here. Naturally on these systems here, the one that we were looking at right there, that's a one-ply system. This would be a two-ply system, asphalt emulsion, four gallons, one-ply, four gallons, second ply. Then you have your gallon and a half of your gray base coat and your gallon and a half of your top coat.

You don't have to use the gray. We like to do it on this type of system. That way you can identify one coat to the next. On all our spec systems, we require that you use a gray system. This is the emulsion. If you decide not to go with emulsion... Now the emulsion system, we give a 10-year labor material or a 15-year labor material for the one or two-ply. This is an acrylic system would be, this is acrylic here, four gallons of acrylic, one-ply od polyester. Then your two coats of acrylic top coat. This represents a 20-year system. You put this on your entire roof. We could offer a 20-year system on this. And then this is our silicone system. The armor base. Same system, three to four gallons down, laminate the polyester in it. And then you've got your two and a half gallons of silicone.

That goes right back to our graph right there. How you'd come up with your two and a half gallons. This year also is a 20-year system. Naturally when we do silicone, a lot of people do not want to put the polyester in there because it's a little costly. But I do recommend that we put a four or six inch polyester in all the laps. It does make a lot better system. And that goes hand in hand with any type of coating that you're doing. If you have loose laps, I would laminate a polyester in the laps prior to put the coating on it.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:48:03].

John Athanasion: But you need the 296 primer, right?

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:48:16].

John Athanasion: And you can see that we can do a 20-inch overlap on these here. That would be your two-ply system. You can do it either way. One in one or overlap or full 20-inch, that'd be shingle fashion.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:49:51].

John Athanasion: Now, when you get into really tight areas down there in Beverly Hills area where you got nowhere to set up your equipment or anything and you're going to do a restoration, using the acrylic system is perfect. You've got all the same component. You can do it out of a bucket and you can put a very nice system together, nice and tight with the acrylic. And it's not dirty when you're in real tight areas and you're using the emulsion, it's very dirty. So the acrylic might be a better answer.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:50:50].

Heidi Ellsworth: And if you have any questions or comments, we're getting to the end of our hour, so this is the time. You also can see the sun is starting to really come out here in Fresno. We've been getting 110, 115 degree days. But before we end, one of the things I would like to ask both of you is, okay, we've done all the prep, the roof is beautiful, you've restored it, it's great. What are those final touches? What's the cleanup look like? And you know what? I have to make sure, John, that you talk about putting tape on the rungs so you're not taking things into the building.

John Athanasion: Absolutely. This is one of the things that we run into all the time. The crew, it's a tall building and they're going to use the inside hatch. So you've got a metal ladder in there. So they start getting up there with their tar shoes, emulsion all over them and they get tar all over the ladder. Now you've got to clean it. But if you get there in the first place and just run tape on every rung, when you're done, you peel the tape off and walk away.

Heidi Ellsworth: Maybe even some plastic.

John Athanasion: There's a lot of precautions.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah.

John Athanasion: Secondly, when you get up on a roof in the first place, you got to determine where you're going to get up and where you're going to get off. And if it's a big roof, you should actually do the area that you're going to get off on first. Let that cure out. That way you have a landing when you get to the end so you can get off the roof.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:52:49].

Heidi Ellsworth: And how about getting all the tips and tricks on getting all the trash off of the empty buckets, the equipment, all of that? That seems to me like that would be a big job.

John Athanasion: The bigger contractors naturally have a forklift or whatever. They may have a dumpster on site. If not, we got the old-fashioned roping wheel. We can lift everything down that way as well.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. Thank you.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:53:23].

Heidi Ellsworth: And from the team, any more questions out there in the chat?

Team member: Chris Lexi says, "Well done."

Heidi Ellsworth: Well done. Thank you. It's nice to hear that come back and thank you so much. Thank you to RCMA, the Roof Coating Manufacturer Association. We talked about them earlier during the weekly blend, but it's all part of this ongoing exposure for roof coatings. And gentlemen, you two are amazing.

Mike Negrete: Thank you too.

John Athanasion: Thank you for having us. And if you have any questions, please feel free to call me, John or Mike. We'd be glad to answer any questions. If you need some assistance on your projects, we'd be glad to help.

Heidi Ellsworth: And you can find all of the information about APOC and all of the ICP brands on CoatingsCoffeeShop on in their directories, which is a great resource to try to find information. You can get directly to the website and you can get to these gentlemen. Of course, if you want to talk to them, all you have to do is email us and let us know heidi@rooferscoffeeshop.com and we'll get you in touch.

John Athanasion: And naturally, if you go to the distributor and they do not have our product, it is available and have them order it for you.

Mike Negrete: [foreign language 00:54:46]. APOC.

Heidi Ellsworth: APOC. I want to say thank you. A big thank you to Mike for the Spanish translation. That is so important to us. It's so important to our industry and inclusiveness across the board. And this was our first time and you were brilliant. Thank you so much.

Mike Negrete: Thank you.

John Athanasion: And we thank you. We welcome all the questions to Mike and we thank you for having it. This is really important. We welcome you into our family.

Outro: Yes, and thank you everybody. Thank you APOC, for being our sponsor. Be sure to join us next month for another Coatings Talk. It's coming every month, same time, same place. So check it out. We will be seeing you next time on Coatings Talk.