Cool roof for hospitals, clinics and care homes

The roof is the most exposed surface of a facility. A dark membrane absorbs solar radiation, heats up and releases that heat towards the floors it covers, usually bedrooms and technical areas. Where air conditioning exists, it offsets continuously and cooling consumption climbs all summer. Where there is none, the heat settles into the rooms and does not leave at night. A reflective coating reverses that behaviour: it sends back up to 94% of the radiation instead of storing it, and lowers the temperature under the roof by 8 to 10 °C.

Older people, infants, patients under treatment and the chronically ill regulate their body temperature poorly. A bedroom that does not cool down at night extends the exposure and complicates care. The same heatwaves drive activity up in emergency departments. In healthcare, summer comfort is a matter of safety for the people you host and of organisation for the teams. Acting on the building envelope produces an immediate effect, without adding equipment to operate or maintain.

The hospital estate is dominated by the flat bituminous membrane roof, often old and already recoated. 80% of Covalba projects are on bituminous membranes over ten years old. EPDM and PVC are also found on more recent buildings, and steel deck on extensions, logistics blocks and covered car parks. Each substrate calls for a different system: CovaSeal 20 when the waterproofing is tired, CovaTherm on a sound membrane, CovaMetal 20 on steel deck.

This constraint holds back many re-roofing projects. Stripping the waterproofing means noise, closed-off zones and sometimes moving whole units. Cool roof is sprayed from the outside: the machines stay on the ground, only the hoses go up, with no cutting, no torching and no rubble. Our teams stay on the roof from start to finish. The works take a few days to a few weeks depending on the area, and the noisy phases are agreed with the director of care.

It all depends on the status of the facility. A public facility can draw on the Fonds Vert, the French green fund, for energy renovation and summer comfort. Our public sector page details that strand and the public procurement logic. A clinic, a laboratory or a private residence falls under the CEE premium, the French energy-saving certificates, through the BAT-EN-112 sheet on reflective roof coatings. One condition: the file must be opened before the works are signed. The décret tertiaire, the French tertiary decree, also applies to tertiary buildings, healthcare facilities included: -30% of final energy consumption by 2030, with an annual declaration on the OPERAT platform.

French labour law sets no maximum temperature beyond which work stops. It does require the employer to assess the risk linked to heat and to take the measures that protect employees. In a healthcare facility, those measures quickly collide with service continuity: you do not postpone an operating theatre and you do not push back a meal round. Treating the envelope acts upstream, on the cause, and benefits care staff as much as patients. Once applied, it also asks nothing of the daily organisation.