Roof Ponding and What it Looks Like
What is Roof Ponding?
Roof ponding is when water gathers in an area of your roof and remains there longer than 48 hours. Roof ponding usually occurs when your rooftop doesn’t drain properly, allowing the water too pool and damage your roof coating.
How do I know if I have roof ponding?
Shown below are a multiple photos of ponding on roofs all over Tucson and southern Arizona.
The building is beautiful to look at, but the roof is shaped like a soup bowl and holds alot of water. When it takes over a month for the pond to evaporate off of the roof after each rain, the coating might last as long as two years. If there was a steep pitch and no pond, this coating could last six years.
A close up of the damage to the roof on the Frank Lloyd Wright building caused by ponding water.
A larger than usual pond on a local Tucson home. Two basic choices. Do a small amount of preventative maintenance on it once a year AND broom it off after big rains, or have it re-coated every couple of years. The right way to fix this is to lower the scuppers but that’s a pretty large project.
Ponding in the middle of the roof.
Its dry now, but the size of the stain indicates there is a pretty good sized pond on this roof when it rains.
The roof over a garage of a friend of mine. He has stairs going up to his roof and sweeps it off each time it rains. It’s held up this way for years because he does preventative maintenance on it.
Another larger than average pond.
And another pond.
As you can probably guess from the photos, ponding is fairly common.
This one is more unusual. Lots and lots of small ponds. This is common on foam roofs and on a homes with shallow pitch and thin plywood on the roof. This coating will age faster than normal but not bad enough that I’d recommend a tear off and new roof.
More ponding. Luckily for the home owner this pond doesn’t end up under the solar heaters. If it did the shade would keep it wet longer and destroy the coating even faster.
A little bigger than I’d like to see, but this size is remarkably common.
Another pond. I’m running out of things to say.
Finally one back in the acceptable range. By acceptable I mean I wouldn’t want it on my house but this wouldn’t stop me from telling my parents to buy a house like this
I probably have 200 pictures of ponds since I take pictures of a roof and then show the client. Here is the last one for now.
What should I do about my roof ponding?
If you notice roof ponding on your roof feel free to give us a call for a free inspection! If your roof needs to be repaired or replaced we’re happy to give you a free quote!
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