The first 72 hours after a hail storm is about volume: nine addresses on one street and a phone that will not stop. Wind on a commercial building is the opposite problem. One roof, one visit, and nobody in a hurry except you.
The difficulty in a commercial flat roof inspection is that the roof is invisible from every place a person normally stands. On a house you can see something from the driveway. Here you can walk the whole parking lot and learn nothing. So the walk has to carry everything, and it has to be recorded while it happens.
Perimeter first, all the way around
Start at the edge and go all the way around before you look at anything in the middle. Wind works on edges first, and the perimeter is what gets cut short because the interesting-looking thing is out in the field.
What gets filmed on the lap, in order as you meet it:
- Coping and edge metal, joint by joint. Lifted sections, open joints, fasteners that have backed out, sealant that has separated.
- Fascia and the drip edge below it, from the roof and again from the ground later.
- The membrane where it turns up at the parapet and terminates. Look at the termination bar, the counterflashing, and the base flashing at every inside and outside corner.
- Scuppers and overflow openings, including anything sitting in them that was not there last week.
Say the elevation out loud as you turn each corner. "North side, walking east." On a rectangular white roof, ten minutes of footage with no orientation in it is unreadable a month later, and the recording is for people who cannot picture the building at all.
Seams, laps and the places two things meet
Then the field, walked in lanes in a fixed direction, the same way you would rotate slopes on a house.
Field seams and T-joints are what to slow down for. Film along a seam rather than pointing at one spot, so length is visible: a two-foot separation and a forty-foot one look identical in a tight photo. Where a lap is open, get low and perpendicular, and say what you can see through it and what you cannot.
Note the direction things are lying. Displaced material generally moved a consistent way across the roof, and a recording that follows that direction tells a coherent story without anybody having to assert anything. Describe it, do not label it. That is the posture argued for in separating storm damage from ordinary wear, and it matters more here, where the reader cannot check you.
Ballast, pads and anything that moved
On a ballasted roof, scour patterns are the record: bare areas where stone used to be, drifts piled against curbs and at the parapet, stone down in the landscaping. Film the bare areas and the drifts in one pass so the relationship is visible, and film the stone on the ground before the grounds crew tidies it, because they will.
Same for pavers and walkway pads shifted out of line, and for anything up there that came from somewhere else. Foreign material gets filmed where it lies, before it is moved. Once it is in a dumpster it never existed.
Curbs, units and every penetration
Rooftop units are where wind evidence collects. Film each one as a unit rather than a series of details: hoods and cowls, access panels and latches, condenser guards, curb flashing at all four sides, and the pitch pans and pipe boots around it.
Do the same for every other penetration, one at a time, with the surrounding field in the same frame. The penetrations are where it leaks makes that case on any roof; with thirty of them it is the difference between a record and a shoebox of close-ups.
Then the drains. Film every drain, its strainer, and whatever has collected around it. A drain that is doing nothing because something is sitting on it is worth two sentences said out loud.
Say what you cannot tell from up here
The most useful sentence on a commercial roof is an admission. "This seam is open about eighteen inches at the lap. I cannot tell from the surface what the insulation under it is doing." "There is staining on the underside of this edge metal. I do not know how old it is."
You are recording an observation, not issuing a verdict, and a clear boundary around what you saw is worth more than a confident sentence you had to stretch to say. The same applies to the interior lap on the same visit: ceiling tiles, wall staining below the parapet line, anything visibly wet, filmed and described as found.
Let the people who cannot get up here watch it happen
The owner is often not local, and whoever manages the building is usually somewhere else that morning. This is what the live link is best at, and one of the scenarios on the use cases page.
Text the link before you climb. Every standard plan allows five people to watch one inspection at the same time, from their own phones, in the browser, no app and no account. You see a live count of how many are on. They see the northeast corner while you are standing on it, which is the only way most of them ever will.
The viewer is strictly one way. No chat, no messages, no microphone, and their own camera is never requested. Nobody can interrupt a long methodical walk, which is mostly good and occasionally not. If you expect questions, put a phone call on speaker alongside the stream before you go up.
It records automatically and the recording lands with the company, not on the phone in your pocket. The link stops working when you end the session or after twelve hours, whichever comes first. The step-by-step is on the how it works page.
Battery, signal and a very large roof
Two things bite at this scale. A full lap of a warehouse roof is a long walk in the sun with the screen on, so battery and thermal limits stop being theoretical. Bring the pack. And signal is strange up there. Quality steps down rather than freezing, and both ends see a warning, so keep walking and narrate a little more than feels necessary.
What you leave with is a dated, narrated record of a surface almost nobody has ever seen, walked in a fixed order by the person standing on it. This post stops there, because that is where the record stops.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.