To keep the integrity of your home or commercial property in Enterprise, knowing what type of roof inspection you need is key to making sure your roof will protect your structure for the long haul. Most of the time, the roofers here in Enterprise will recommend the most basic and common roof inspection to you. This is the visual inspection, where a roofer (hopefully a qualified one) looks at your roof and determines if there are any issues. The good thing about this type of inspection is that you can kind of do it yourself too, or maybe you could have your dad back in the day do it for you—having a visual inspection is just that basic. However, if you want a certified and qualified judgment, then it’s better to leave it in the hands of a professional. If a visual inspection is done, the person doing it will have a nice understanding of what roofs are supposed to do.
The modern solution for less involved and more detailed inspections is drone technology. Giving you a "top-down" perspective, drone inspections are well-suited to provide an ideal overview of roofs for people wanting both an in-depth and safe inspection. The high-resolution images and videos do most of the work for us: We can see the "big picture" and also look very closely at just about any part of the roof. There are several reasons why this type of inspection works so well: First, we can see almost any side of the roof—from the comfort of the drone—in a perfect view and also at varied angles. Second, we can collect the "data" (see images and videos) with great "ease." And, third, with the advent of new and fancy "software," we can analyze these data at both a gross and fine level, to assess whether there's actually any in-detail problem with the roof.
Another advanced layer of assessment helps provide a high-quality roof inspection, especially when it comes to moisture problems. Infrared inspections detect temperature changes on the surface of the roof and help identify the areas getting little or no heat. Why is that important? Because if you think about the way heat moves through the building envelope (the roof, walls, etc.), it’s easy to see that if some part of the envelope is humid or wet, it’s not going to perform like a dry part of the roof. For a variety of reasons (poor installation, bad materials, or just time), the roofing assembly can get wet and not dry out. What we’re looking for is a section of the assembly that is cool relative to the surrounding area. And to really do this well, we do need to wait until after the sun has gone down (or almost done so) for the roof to be barely above the ambient air temperature, with a clear night sky overhead. After that, we can use the infrared camera to really see what’s going on in the roof system without tearing anything apart.
