How thick should a flat roof be?

A minimum thickness of 18 mm should always be used. Depending on the use of the building, insulation may be required to build a “warm roof” build-up. Plywood sheets are attached to flat roof joists to form a flat base, hence the name flat roof. If you own a home or commercial building, you've probably heard of roof thickness.

Whether your roof is sloped or flat, thickness matters when it comes to choosing the right material for your roof. The options are more abundant for pitched roofs. Flat or low-slope roofs are another story. In accordance with the new Novoclimat standards in place, the insulation thickness of a flat roof must meet or exceed an R-41 value for new construction.

The most commonly used ones are around 10 feet. The average thickness ranges from 45 to 90 mil. It is generally recommended to install a membrane at least 50 mil thick. Steel sheets must have a thickness of 0.65 mm or more.

The aluminum must have a minimum thickness of 0.9 mm. Clean all sheets before installing the insulation. People just don't want to pay for it, and if you can afford an occasional leak, the lifecycle cost of a TPO roof might make more sense. Many lean in various directions, such as crushed hipped roofs, toward the sinks that connect to the downspouts.

To make sure you are using the right product and to ensure that the insulation thickness of a flat roof is adequate, ask Clinique de la toiture FCA, a specialist in roof remodeling and roof insulation, for advice. And PVC cannot come into direct contact with bituminous products, so a separation sheet will be required if it is superimposed on a roof of T&G. It is costly to take a “mestizo” PVC recycling stream and make it suitable for a designed product, such as a roofing membrane, so it is likely that membranes cannot be recycled into roofing membranes. I have been working on flat roofs since I was 12 years old and my family has been in the industry for 4 generations.

This makes a lot of sense to me, especially since I feel that if flat roofs had an excess of water in them, it could cause them to collapse. Flat roofs are not architecturally logical, as rain and snow come off much faster from a pitched roof. With proper maintenance, basically just repositioning curb corners and reinforcing field joints (very easy with current peel and stick products), you can easily get 50 years of an EPDM roof. As the roof is installed, more and more layers are added to increase durability and longevity, hence the name “build-up”.

When considering other materials for flat roofs, you can get lost among the acronyms, whatever the thickness. Working in sections, finish the rest of the roof, smoothing out the air bubbles with the now dry roller before gluing the edges up the wall and parapet and 6 inches down over the front of the roof. The out-of-the-box alternative to custom flashing is a galvanized drip edge specially made for flat roofs. I have been roofing for more than 35 years, my company has still been built, because it has proven itself for hundreds of years, tpo, pvc and epdm, all fail for 10 years or less.