How Roofers Can Keep Up During the Busy Summer Season

In most areas, summer is the busy season for roofing. That’s when the weather is right to get the job done—even if it means you’ll be taking various measures to keep workers safe in the heat.

As summer ramps up, it can be easy to get behind. Fortunately, there are ways to keep up when summer is at its busiest. The SCRAIL® ROOFLOC®system is one of them. It’s a fastener system designed to fire nail screws in sheet metal roofs and facades, which can make the job go much faster. But we’ll discuss that more below, along with some other tips to help you keep up.

1) Create To-Do Lists and Agendas the Day Before

One of the best ways to keep pace is to stay organized. At the end of each workday, set aside some time to focus on the things you’ll need to do the next day. Start with a to-do list that covers the meetings you’ll need to attend, orders that need to be placed, and whatever other tasks need to be done. Creating a schedule in advance helps you hit the ground running at the start of a new day.

If you are holding meetings the next day, make sure to get your agenda squared away, too. Agendas help your meeting stay on track so that you’re not wasting time on needless discussions—and completing them the day before gives you a chance to review and refine them ahead of the meeting.

2) Take Care of Yourself and Your Workers

No one can work at peak capacity for long—it’s a recipe for rapid burnout. While it may seem counterintuitive, taking more breaks can help people stay more productive. For workers, that means allowing for water breaks every 15 minutes or so when it’s warm outside—even when temperatures aren’t extreme. A little bit of rest time plus some ice-cold water helps everyone feel refreshed and ready to work.

You should also make it a policy for workers to wear light-colored clothing, hats, or sunglasses to keep the sun out of their eyes, and sunscreen to prevent sunburn. This will help everyone maintain the energy needed to push through a busy roofing season.

3) Invest in Tool Upgrades

Tools are a roofing company’s lifeblood—and the better your tools, the more efficiently everyone can work. Always be on the lookout for tools that can make the job easier. That includes not just hand tools, but saws, power tools, and even things like scaffolding that is easy to set up and tear down or lifting systems that workers can use to haul products up onto the roof.

One idea is to invest in the SCRAIL® ROOFLOC® system. This gives you a pneumatic tool that can drive fasteners on sheet metal roofs—and that can make the task of installing a metal roof so much faster and easier compared to power drills or other tools.

4) Keep Track of the Weather

As every roofer knows, there will be days when it’s just not a good idea to work on a roofing project. High winds, thunderstorms, extreme heat—these can all prove dangerous. Keep an eye on the weather forecast and make a plan for those days. These days can be a great time to catch up on things that need to be done at the office or around the workshop, like paperwork, cleaning, organizing, or prepping for upcoming jobs. If you’re all caught up on those things, then don’t hesitate to enjoy a day off so that you and your workers can recharge.

5) Limit Everyone’s Time on the Roof

The rooftop is where the heat reaches extremes—and not only is it exhausting, but it can also prove dangerous. There are a couple of things you can do to limit everyone’s time on the roof.

For starters, do as much as possible on the ground. Cutting sheet metal, opening boxes of shingles or rolls of underlayment, trimming fascia or synthetic underlayment to size—these are all things that you could feasibly do on the ground, preferably in the shade of the building.

Another way to limit time spent on the roof is to set up a rotation among your workforce. Give everyone shifts where they work on the rooftop for a little while before rotating off to handle tasks on the ground. This gives everyone a chance to get out of the more extreme temperatures to cool off.

Investing in the SCRAIL® ROOFLOC® System

You’ve learned a little bit about ROOFLOC® already—but there are a few other things that may interest you. The SCRAIL® ROOFLOC® system is designed to speed jobs up by offering a single-shot actuation system, which means you can drive nail screws through sheet metal and other materials just like you would when using a nail gun with wood. It’s ideal for exterior jobs like roofing and siding, particularly since the fasteners to match this system feature FASCOAT® coating (which increases the fasteners’ resistance to the elements). To learn more about the advantages of this system, click below!