Some of these roofs are too big to walk well

A rail-served warehouse in Salt Lake City's northwest quadrant can run several hundred thousand square feet under one membrane. The distribution roofs near the airport and the big-box and multi-tenant centers strung along Redwood Road aren't much smaller. Walking that much surface by hand eats most of a day, drags crew foot traffic across a membrane we may not trust yet, and still misses the shallow ponding pockets that collect between drains where nobody's eye lands. We fly those roofs instead. A systematic grid pass at a fixed altitude produces a complete, geotagged photographic record of the entire surface before a single boot touches the deck.

The high-resolution visual sweep is useful on its own - it catches lifted seams, split flashings, displaced ballast, and standing water you'd never spot from deck height. But the reason we lead with a drone on large commercial roofs is the infrared camera riding alongside it.

Infrared finds the water the surface hides

Wet insulation and dry insulation shed heat at different rates. After a sunny day, saturated areas hold the day's warmth and release it slowly, so during the cool-down window after sunset they glow against the surrounding field in thermal imagery. We fly the infrared pass inside that window and hand you a moisture map showing precisely where water has worked into the assembly - frequently in spots where the membrane topside looks flawless.

That map settles the most expensive question an owner faces: recover, or tear off. If the trapped moisture is confined to a handful of patches around drains or a failed curb, we cut those out and recover the rest. If it's bled across a quarter or more of the field, recovering over it just seals wet insulation in to rot the deck and tear the assembly apart through freeze-thaw. Without thermal data, that decision is a guess wrapped in a quote. With it, you're budgeting against a documented map.

Why trapped moisture is worse here

Salt Lake City sits near 4,226 feet, and the freeze-thaw cycling at this elevation is brutal on saturated insulation. Water that sneaks in during a fall storm freezes, expands, thaws, and refreezes across the cold months, prying the assembly apart from the inside long before a ceiling stain announces it. Snowmelt pooling around interior drains is a recurring intrusion point on valley roofs, and slow leaks tend to surface in winter when access and repair are hardest. Mapping that moisture early - while it's still a localized cut-and-patch - is the line between a maintenance ticket and a capital replacement.