Terrace waterproofing

"In Mallorca, it hardly ever rains, but when it rains ...!" You have probably heard or said this expression more than once. We hear it constantly from our work of budgeting a multitude of waterproofing of terraces, and we know that there are few things worse than having humidity at home and looking at the weather forecast thinking that the humidity of the last time has not yet been repaired. We would like to tell you a little about the different types of waterproofing that can be done on a terrace.

TYPES OF FLAT ROOFS
Although the title of this article is waterproofing of terraces, everything that we are going to comment is also valid for waterproofing balconies, roofs, terraces or in general to waterproof any flat roof.

It is not the objective of this article to analyze in-depth all the types of existing flat roofs; we can talk about that another day. We are just going to take into account that a flat roof has a maximum slope of 5% and that it may or may not be passable. Let us analyze these characteristics a bit.

- A flat roof has a maximum slope of 5% (if the slope is greater we are already talking about a sloping roof). The conceptual differences are the following: the flat roof is intended to be used by people for their enjoyment or to house useful machinery for the building; while the sloping roof is used only as insulation of the building against weather conditions. When choosing a waterproofing, it is essential to distinguish between a flat roof and a sloping roof since the sloping roof only repels water, while the flat roof redirects it and channels rainwater.

- All flat roofs are passable by definition, so it seems more appropriate to define passable roofs as passable for frequent or intensive use and non-passable roofs as occasional-use or walkable roofs. With this idea in mind, we are going to see some examples.

· Passable: Balconies, terraces with furniture (tables, chairs, flowerpots ...), terraces with frequent pedestrian traffic.

· Not passable: Roofs that are only walked on from time to time for maintenance reasons.