PVC days limited?

I am always listening to learn.

People are always looking at what we/society are not doing. Instead of what we have accomplished. We are always moving forward in society.

I recycled before it was popular. I also believe in using the products we have available to us. I sometimes make the decsion to use a product for financial reasons and not what the effect on the earth is. I use products for my pleasure and not based on need.

I believe one day we will dig up the landfills and mine all the products that are stored there.

Why would a company market a product in a country where it is not wanted? We market products that customers want.

TomB,

Thanks. Yes, I've considered politicin', but no I doubt I ever do. Too much compromise for my taste.

As for lawyerin', Oh, I'da loved to been a trial lawyer, slingin' mud and befuddlin' 'em with BS, but alas, me and school just weren't the best of friends. My grandfather however is a past president of the Ohio BAR, so I reckon it runs in the veins. LOL

As for TPO taking over, I thought it already had, but it's harder to find with some Googlin' than I woulda thought. I did find one roofing company that published it's the top product at 36+% market share, which sounds consistent with data I believe a manufacturer showed me.

But how long it lasts, or what it's future holds, I dunno.

tpo http://www.tporoofing.org/guide-for-roofing-contractors-comparative-history-of-tpo-vs-pvc-in-the-us-vs-europe/

I hope you enjoyed your ride.

Egg, thanks for that link.

That link was informative, at least as reinforcement for some points that need explaining to people. Don't care for the way simple grammar mistakes creep into some of these things I read on the web, though. This one wasn't bad, but Crikey. Even "official" news articles show frequent and egregious lack of professional proofreading and editing. So if someone has put the bags away and is now engaged professionally in writing about roofing, the details in the writing craft must equate in some manner to the details in the former roofing craft. I've been around too long to get star-struck. A is congruent to B is congruent to C. The wave-length of the energy coming out of a person's head will tend to affect reading, writing, rithmetic, and craftsmanship and all in about the same manner. If a person wants to be read and yet can't take the time to edit, I don't want that person making me a sandwich or putting on my roof or fixing my car or advising me on which stocks to pick or passing legislation which could affect me in ways that person never dreamed of or teaching my children how to think or even driving a garbage truck down my street.

Am I world-weary or what??? Whew!

So I had a client call me for advice on a commercial job he needed reroofed. He trusts me because I have earned his trust.

He knows I don't do large work and he knows I have retired my kettle.

So he read me the four proposals and asked for my comments.

One guy specified TPO only. I told my client to go back and get a bid from him for PVC and this was the answer he got: "Oh, we can do PVC. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. There is absolutely no difference." It's not really hard to flush out the b.s.ers is it? They do that all on their own. Open mouth and let fly.

Before we practice what it's like to roll over in our graves, let's rather just give ourselves permission to ressurrect a quote from Richard Kaller. "Our competition makes us look good."

Oh how sweet a word from Richard. If only it didn't so often take a decade to make the view clear. Low prices sure look good on paper.

I thought that article would make you cringe. It appears to be some sort of blogging from a "roofer". He certainly did a little more research than most, but it didn't say anything I haven't said in 12,000 times more words. I guess I just thought it was a lot easier to read. LOL

I suspect everyone at one point or another gets tired of my Fibertite promoting, but since this conversation has revolved around PVC's I thought this might be a good time to try and just share some brief things.

1. Literally all catastrophic early PVC failures were with unreinforced Trocal, and some lesser failures (meaning 20 years or less) were with phthalate plasticized PVC. Generally, the thinner the membrane, the faster the failure.

2. To my knowledge, every PVC except one uses phthalate as the primary plasticizer, while a few (think cooley, carlisle, etc) use some KEE to improve on the basic mixture.

3. Only one uses KEE exclusively. That one began not as a roofing material, but as a chemical pond and landfill liner. It's Fibertite, born of the XR-5 membrane.

4. Whereas most companies struggle to make a sheet as cheaply as possible while lasting long enough to qualify as a viable roof product, Seaman Corp converted a product expected to do much more, and manage to do it at a price point that at least enables them to be in the ball park of other higher end products.

5. While it's often classified as PVC for simplicity sake, or because it's easy so architects can use it as a "competitive" number, etc... It's actually the only KEE sheet on the market. That doesn't mean it's the only sheet with KEE, but it's the only sheet with more than 50% of the compound being KEE. It's just the opposite of other products. Others use KEE to improve PVC. Fibertite uses PVC to make the KEE weldable.

6. KEE is unaffected by UV and the widest array of chemicals in the market.

7. I once had an opportunity to talk to the man in charge of the NRCA "roof farm" while attending the Ohio RCA convention. I asked him about thermoplastics. In his response he sang the praises of one particular product- (keep in mind he can't name products) "A polyester reinforced, weft-inserted weave, with 50% or more KEE ...". There was only one product on the market that met that description.

34. (that's an odd number, eh?) Thirty-Four. That's the number of years HRI has installed 36 mil Fibertite without a single failure due to membrane deterioration.

It really is different than what most of us are accustomed to from the roofing supply side of the industry.

I've asked two of the larger roofing companies around here to provide quotes to people for PVC and I asked them both if they were approved to install Fibertite. They both said they were and they both preferred to quote Durolast.

One of them does what I term grade B work. I don't mean that sarcastically. I'm using the old-school framework of A to F, so grade B is definitely what goes out to the public as "industry standard or better." I've done some grade B work myself, especially in the old cut-throat environment I had to come up through, so I'm not being a snot here when I use the term "grade B." Not bad, just not great.

The other does superior work as far as I have seen.

When I pressed them what I got was a very strong sense that they weren't heavily invested in long-range (twenty-plus yrs.) performance. What they seemed to resist was high minimum orders (500 sq.) and having to stock material for an indefinite period of time until another job "came up." In fairness to them, I would have to say that this environment has not been up to speed on single-ply systems, hung onto BUR for a very long time after it was long in decline in popularity elsewhere, and for whatever reason(s) they were unable or unwilling or uninterested in extensively educating either themselves or plan specifiers in general. That is why TPO is all the rage here now.

I found a temporary (quite legal) source for fasteners, someone going out of business, and snapped up all sorts of bulk screws while I could. While there, a man came in and was gorging on stainless steel fasteners of any type he could get his hands on at quite low prices. When I asked him what was the deal, he told me he owned a place on the coast in Mexico and "you can't get this stuff down there."

Maybe we are just experiencing a minor form of that here. Locals don't yet perceive the need. The picture Mike paints of the differences between sheets, and the reasons for that, is pretty conclusive to me. Very convincing. I have archived discussions from this site going back to at least 2006 concerning various membranes, and the experience and wisdom he has shared have been consistent and unstinting. Why self-professed, quality-minded, California architects who normally look down their noses at lack-luster material products and design, would be so gaga over TPO truly confounds me.

I put on a few hundred squares of Hardi material and lived to tell the tale despite the fact that they disappeared as a shingle material for apparently very good reasons. Our mild weather probably saved my bacon with that. I don't think they were pretty, but they never really tried to be slate or wood and they seemed like the only viable alternative on the market that would simply be what it was without a lot of pretense. I resisted the temptation to get involved with virtually every other facsimile wood/slate product and am grateful I did, watching in disgust over the years, decades really, as product after product flopped on its face. I think I'm witnessing another instance of that here, nothing quite so horrific as the wholesale failure of that Dual80 system of the late Sixties, but something quite extraordinary nonetheless. I am suspicious that as this phenomenon develops, thousands upon thousands of people are going to rue the day they opted for TPO.

I put on a ton of three and four-ply glass with rock or capsheet that lasted well over twenty years with no serious failures that I know of on any jobs that I controlled personally. Yeah, hot smells if you don't like the smell and yeah, it's dangerous to use if you don't take care with it or know what you're doing, but it's strong, very strong, it can be worked on, added to, subtracted from, maintained pretty easily, and it lasts.

We'll see.

Off topic but still interesting. Sailing vocabulary referring to "Hot." The seam between the sheer strake and the strake below it had the name " the devil". In the old days it was always neccesary to pay the seams with hot pitch and since this was the longest seam in the boat, it was a very difficult job. Out of that came the old expression " There's the devil to pay" and in its original form the following was always added " and no pitch hot" B) :) :) B) Deep Down In Florida Where The Sun Shines Damn Near Every Day

Recently I was talking to a plumber I've known for a long time. He mostly does high end homes. In the past 6 or 7 years, use of copper pipes for supply lines has dropped from about half to less than 10%. It's now all the PEX system. The P stands for polyethylene.

Even though there has been several disastrous previous attempts at plastic supply lines, I guess this PEX system is the real thing and is now accepted everywhere. Maybe that will be repeated in roofing.

Woody; There'already an alternative PVC in play, (uPVC? or something like that), in Europe, & more to come, I'm sure.

Back on topic; For the short term, simple economics/capitalism will sustain the use of PVC roofing in the USA, barring artificial components influx, (i.e. gov't intervention - i.e., recent solar energy phenomenon).

Manville rep told me the other day that TPO was 45% of the entire market last year.

It's safe to say the day has come that low priice buys market share and the TPO storm is raging. If this stuff is as bad as the stuff of the 90's and early 2000's, those of us preaching other products are gonna have a lot of fun over the next 10 years.