Proactive Maintenance is key

08 Feb Proactive Maintenance is key

Good maintenance begins with a proactive approach to maintain, keep, preserve and protect a building. The purpose of proactive maintenance is to detect issues that can be anticipated and rectified before they develop further.

 🔹 A preventative maintenance program of the concrete structures is likely to be more cost-effective depending on the extent of the damaged concrete.

🔹 A regularly scheduled maintenance inspection means that potential issues with water damage and concrete deterioration are detected and addressed before they develop into more significant problems.

Remedial waterproofing and concrete repairs are a fact of life for any organisation whose assets include sizeable concrete structures.

We typically see leaking concrete slab ceilings in multilevel car parks. Undercover or underground car parks are especially prone to water seeping through the concrete.

Whether the source of water is from a leaking crack or a joint/pipe penetration, the seepage will carry calcium and/or lime with it, through to the surface of the concrete.

Unprotected assets such as cars, may be at risk of damage by the calcium deposits dripping onto the cars and etching into the paintwork. The problem with water seepage dripping onto cars is that the minerals that etch into the surface of the car’s paint finish, make it hard to remove with a simple wash. This is especially the case if the water spots are not addressed immediately after it has happened and/or if the car is exposed to the hot sun before washing it off.

Even a slow drip overnight can permanently damage a car’s paintwork, which is more visually evident on dark or bright coloured cars. If the calcium deposit is not possible to clean off, then the tenant/car owner may need to have the car re-sprayed. In many cases, the whole car will need to be re-sprayed, not just the one panel that is affected. Depending on the car’s age, a perfect match will be near impossible to achieve.

The tenant/car owner may decide to put a claim through to Body Corporate to cover the cost of the re-spray. Depending on the extent of the seepage, a selection of the car park’s parking lots may have to be blocked off until repairs have been completed. As a consequence, the tenants are inconvenienced by not having access to their allocated parking lot, and the Body Corporate miss out on parking fee income during the downtime in addition to the expense of the repairs to be carried out.

Calcium deposit on paintwork on a car in a carpark.

In hindsight, a preventative maintenance program of the concrete structures is likely to be more cost-effective depending on the extent of the damaged concrete. A regularly scheduled maintenance inspection means that potential issues with water damage and concrete deterioration are detected and addressed before they develop into more significant problems.