PVC Roofing

Why PVC

PVC costs more than TPO and there is one situation where paying for it is not optional. Animal fats and oils from commercial kitchen exhaust degrade TPO. PVC resists them. Every restaurant, grocery with a hot deli, hospital kitchen, school cafeteria and food processing facility should be looking at PVC.

It also resists a wide range of industrial exhaust, uses the same heat welded seams as TPO, and is inherently flame retardant with a reflective white surface.

Where It Is Not Justified

On a standard office, retail or warehouse roof with no grease or chemical exhaust, TPO gives you most of the same benefits for less. We will say so. Specifying PVC on a building that does not need it is a way to inflate a bid.

Compatibility Warning

PVC is not compatible with asphalt. Direct contact causes plasticizer migration and the membrane goes brittle. On any recover over a built-up or modified bitumen roof, a separator layer or cover board is mandatory. This gets missed by contractors who do not work in PVC regularly, and the failure shows up years later.

Kitchen Exhaust Is A Texas Summer Problem

Grease and heat compound each other. A restaurant roof in the Metroplex bakes all afternoon, and the deposit landing around the exhaust fan stays warm and mobile instead of sitting there as a solid film. It spreads downslope, it works into seams, and it gets tracked around by every service technician who walks through it.

What we build for that: PVC in the discharge zone at minimum, grease containment at the fan with a collection system somebody is actually assigned to service, walkway pads on the routes technicians use, and a sacrificial membrane layer in the worst of the fallout area so the wear happens on something replaceable. Then we come back and look at it, since a grease zone is a maintenance item on a schedule. Restaurant and grocery landlords across DFW inherit this problem from a previous tenant more often than they create it.