Hi, I’m Craig with Bucars RV Centre. I’d like to talk about checking our roofs for potential water leaks.
As we get towards the end of the season and it’s time to put our trailers away, I like to get up and walk my roof and look at my sealants around my skylights my vents. So providing we have a ladder tied to our trailer we know our roof will be rated weight load wise to walk upon. If we don’t have a ladder than a stepladder will be required and take a few tentative steps as you get up onto your roof just to make sure she’s nice and stable and will support you once up on the roof. I like to walk around and check all my vents, skylights, TV antenna, anywhere that we have sealant around its base and I’m going to be looking for any imperfections, potential cuts or screws protruding through to be cleaned up and spot sealed before the snow flies.
I’ve noticed on this unit we’ve got a screw starting to poke through the sealant. In this corner, we’ve got the sealant also lifting. And on rubber roofs, the product they use is a product called Dicor. It’s a self-levelling compound when applied over top will bond to the previous material and then self-level and reseal any potential water infiltration spots on our trailer. Now with this unit, we see our Dicor is fairly dirty. So what I like to do is take bit of warm water, a few drops of dish soap and just scrub off the area to get off any loose dirt and grime and foreign material. We don’t need it to be gleaning white when we’re done just so we have a clean surface for the new product to bond to. The product we’re using is Dicor, it comes in a cocking tube. We’re just going to simply apply over top of the existing material, make sure we’re in close in the case of the corner here.
So another area of concern I’ve noticed is on this end seam here, now as we get to the corners our Dicor is a self-levelling compound any product applied would drip down the side. So for that we’re going to go into a product we use called Sikaflex. This would be used around a lot of mouldings as well as your windows on your unit and this will not run and here we’re just going to apply this same fashion, sealing off our corner therefore we don’t have to worry about the potential of any water getting in and causing any damage to our trailer. So basically that’s what I look for when I’m up on these roofs. Any area in question that could be a potential concern for water infiltration to the units. Once we’re sealed up it skins over almost immediately and we know it’s going to write out the winter nice and safe and we’re not gonna have issues come spring.
