The Leak

It's a fairly common sight after heavy rain in any home or structure. In this case we had sprung a leak afternheavy rainfall at the office.

The company has a workshop and this is the storage loft pictured above, right above the offices. The water was dripping down onto a ventilation fan and then seeping through and dripping into the office.

Upon further investigation the next day, a ray of sunshine was spotted further up the peak roof.

I needed to peel away the insulation to verify but this was definitely the hole where the water was coming in as it was in line with the water dropping out of the insulation of the roof.

Opening up the insulation further I could see that this hole was much bigger than previously thought. It was actually a part of a larger hole that had been patched a long time ago. Some sort of cloth and sealant had been used but now the roof sheeting had crumbled away further to let the rain in... the dreaded, outdated, discontinued and now illegal: asbestos roofing sheets.

Definitely something I wanted to avoid doing was to break or remove any piece of the existing roof sheets. Google asbestosis if you want to know why.

The Friday Fix

Knowing that we would be expecting rain during the weekend, I needed to come up with a short term solution that would reduce the chances of a leak or at least slow the leak down.

I opted for some A.B.E flashing tape.

This tape is a peel and stick solution with no drying time required. It has an aluminum foil attached to it, which gives the sticky rubber-like adhesive surface some rigidity.

With a soft touch, the tape does not seem to be that sticky but once you apply pressure and rub out the bubbles a d allow it to bond, it becomes rock solid.

The final result was achieved by layering the strips to cover the whole area. I made sure each strip was well pressed in before applying the next strip.

After a weekend of rain the strips help up fine!. The tape was not wet or wet, no water spots on the floor beneath.

Success!

The long term Nerdy solution - Raintite

So here comes the Nerdy part of it all. The part where I come up with the long term solution... determined by the thing that most tradesmen in my company seems to hate: Reading.

Maybe it is because I am a Health and Safety Officer, maybe I have been trained to read things and figure them out, but it is not the first time I am the one busy reading the manual for something and all of a sudden I am doing it better than "tradesmen" who have years of experience.

My thoughts there is that there was an engineer who designed the product, the product would have needed to be tested for the intended purpose and between Regulations, Certifications and expected use, the manufacturer releases a little bit of writing that tells you what the specifications are of the product and what it's limitations are.

Seem simple right?

Apparently it is really hard...

Anyway, I discovered Sika Raintite - An Acrylic waterproofing system. Having read all the jargon, I determined that this would be the best long term solution.

Since the A.B.E tape had not leaked, I determined that I would apply the seal over the A.B.E tape.

So let me show you how it's done.

My first step is to paint the Raintite on to the area that I want to seal.

After that I apply the cloth membrane.

The membrane is simply pressed into the thickly painted waterproofing paint.

I then paint over the cloth. I added a second cloth to overlap the first one so the whole area is covered broadly. You have to overlap your leak significantly in order to make it a seal.

I let this get touch dry before applying the final coat.

All in all, this turned out to be a very economical product since I have a lot of it left over. The product has a shelf life of around 12 months.

I hope you liked this little DIY I did at work. I took a lot of progress shots to share with management while I worked. So it was obvious to me that I could be putting up my own little DIY post here.

Cheers!