5 things to know about roof coating thickness

Confused about roofing coating thickness? In this video, Bob explains 5 key things you need to know about coating thickness and how to make sure you're meeting manufacturer specifications.

Transcription:

We know you want to be confident when you're talking about roof coatings. In order to do this, you need to understand the concept of Mil thickness. The problem with terms like mil thickness and gallons per square is that they can seem confusing.

We believe it's wrong for such an important concept to be unclear. I know when I first started looking at roof coating, I was confused, but if you just spend a few minutes looking at the details, it will all begin to make sense.

So here's what you need to know. There are five key concepts when it comes to mil thickness of roof coating. 1) if we take one cubic inch and we peel off of that one cubic inch, one one thousandth of an inch, we call that one mil or 0.001. One cubic inch. Now if we take that cubic inch and say, how many of those make up one gallon, we come to... 2) there are 231 cubic inches in one gallon, whether it's milk or roof coating, 231 cubic inches, make up one gallon. 3) If we want to take this one gallon and spread it over one roofing square, we look at that roofing square and say, "how big is that?" Well, it's 100 square feet or 14,400 square inches. 4) We take 231 and we've divide it evenly over the one square. Well, that's one gallon per one square or 231 divided by 14,400, don't lose me here. It's pretty simple because this simply comes to 0.016 or 16 one thousandths. Remember we had one 1000 up there. Or 16 mils.

5) and the final concept, let's say we have three roof coatings here and we put them all on a roof surface at 16 mils. Well, if you look at the back of your can, it might say this coating contains 50% solids or 75% solids. What does that mean? Well, what that means is when it dries out, how much coating is left on the roof, how thick is that? And this is what way you look at that. 16 mils times your 50% solids rating. Will leave eight mils dry on the, if you have 75% solids, 16 mils will turn into 12 mils dry. And if your can says you have 90% solids, you take 0.9 times 16 and you end up with 14.4 as your mil thickness. With those simple five concepts, you can be confident when you're talking about roof coating, stop being afraid about going into the details and be a professional. Just follow these simple details and you will talk about successful roof coating applications.