Vegetated roofs · Amenity gardens · Eco assemblies
The roof is alive. The leak is hiding under it. Find it without stripping the garden.
Green roofs bury their membranes under drainage, soil, and planting — which is wonderful for the building and miserable for leak finding. The wrong approach strips the whole assembly to find one breach. Ours narrows first: flood zoning, thermal and aerial moisture mapping, and interior correlation bound the suspect zone to square metres before a single tray moves.
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Where vegetated assemblies fail
- Membrane punctures from planting, maintenance, and root pressure
- Seam and detail failures at drains, edges, and penetrations
- Root barrier breaches letting growth reach the membrane
- Drainage layer blockages ponding water where design never intended
- Border and transition details between vegetated and bare zones
- Irrigation lines within the assembly leaking into it
The narrowing sequence
- 1
Assembly & symptom review
Build-up drawings, drainage layout, irrigation routing, and the interior drip map below — lateral travel means the breach is upstream of the symptom, and the assembly drawings say which way upstream runs.
- 2
Moisture mapping
Thermal capture — drone radiometric on larger roofs — plus probe verification maps where the assembly holds water beyond design. Wetter-than-design is the anomaly that matters on a roof that's wet on purpose.
- 3
Zone flood testing
Drains plugged section by section, zones flooded in controlled sequence with the interior watched — the zone that reproduces the leak owns the breach.
- 4
Targeted opening
Vegetation and medium set aside only over the convicted zone; membrane inspected, tested, repaired by your roofer, and the garden reinstated. Square metres of disturbance, not the whole living roof.
Owners ask
How do you find a membrane leak under a living roof?
By narrowing before anyone lifts anything. Zone flood testing isolates sections of the roof hydraulically; thermal and moisture survey — including drone radiometric capture on larger assemblies — maps where the overburden and insulation hold water abnormally; and interior drip mapping below ties the evidence together. The result is a bounded suspect zone of square metres, not a directive to strip the entire garden to find one breach.
Why are green roof leaks harder than ordinary roof leaks?
Three compounding reasons: the membrane is buried under drainage mat, growing medium, and vegetation, so nothing is visible; the assembly intentionally retains water, so 'wet' is partly by design and the anomaly is wetter-than-design; and water travels laterally along the membrane before finding the breach's interior exit. Investigation methods built for bare membranes need rethinking here — which is precisely the specialty.
Will the investigation damage the planting?
The narrowing phase touches nothing — flood zoning, thermal capture, and interior mapping are all non-invasive. Only the confirmed suspect zone gets carefully opened: vegetation and medium set aside in sections, membrane inspected and tested, then reinstated. On most files that's a few square metres of disturbance instead of the wholesale strip-off owners fear.
Our green roof is over occupied space. Does that change urgency?
It raises it — a vegetated assembly can hide a breach for a long time while structure and insulation below absorb the consequence, and over suites or offices the eventual interior arrival is expensive. Periodic moisture baselines (annual thermal capture works well on green roofs) catch developing problems while they're still small openings, not remediation projects.
Podium deck investigation·Aerial roof thermal·Roof leak detection·Commercial roofs
Save the garden. Convict the zone.
Free phone consult — assembly type, symptoms, and the right narrowing plan in five minutes.