Why Silicone Mastic Outperforms Every Other Commercial Roof Repair Product
Every commercial roof eventually reaches the point where the roofing membrane is still serviceable but the components around it are not. Flashing lets go. Horizontal seams open up. Penetrations that were sealed a decade ago start letting water past. When that happens the question is not whether to re-roof — it is which repair product will still be holding in fifteen years.
After working exclusively as a roof coating applicator since 2013, we have landed on one answer for the vast majority of these repairs: silicone mastic.
Three Reasons It Holds
- It bonds to anything. Silicone mastic will bond to any commercial roofing substrate, which matters enormously on an older building where you are dealing with three different materials meeting at the same detail.
- It moves with the roof. Its extreme elongation lets it expand and contract with the roof through Texas heat and winter cold. Rigid repair products fail at exactly the point where the substrate moves most — which is why so many patches let go at the seam they were meant to protect.
- It does not break down in the sun. Silicone mastic is highly UV stable, which is what allows these repairs to last up to 20 years rather than a couple of seasons.
A recent job shows what this looks like in practice. On a commercial office building on Inwood Road in Dallas we repaired 100 feet of failed EPDM flashing, sealed 30 feet of open horizontal seams in the sheet metal roof, and sealed nine roof penetrations — all of it leaking into the office space below, and all of it repaired with GAF silicone mastic rather than a tear-off. The full project is written up on our Dallas page.
If you have an old roofing system with failing components, that is usually a repair, not a replacement. Give Pepper Coatings LLC a call for a free commercial roof inspection and we will tell you honestly which one you are looking at.
