Keep an eye on your green roof

For companies wanting to go green, industrial roofs can be a huge potential opportunity. Across many industries, literal acres of factory roofs are simply wasted space that could hold solar panels or even green roofs. The idea of covering a building’s roof with a waterproof membrane and slow-growing vegetation may sound odd, but it can help with mitigating rainwater runoff and reducing a facilities’ contribution to the so-called urban heat island. A green roof acts as insulation from the sun and wind, and during the growing season provides substantial evaporative cooling. The combination of added insulation and evaporative cooling can reduce a building’s interior heating and cooling requirements.

However, you can’t just “plant it and forget it” when it comes to building a green roof. It is important to monitor performance, in order to verify that a green roof is providing the benefits to justify the investment. In fact, for building projects participating in the LEED Green Building Rating System, documentation of green roof performance is actually required.

Onset Computer Corp., a supplier of data loggers and weather stations, recently announced the HOBO Green Roof Monitoring System, a research-grade system for measuring the performance of green roofs. HOBO provides reliable performance in harsh rooftop conditions—the 15-channel system enables users to quickly and easily monitor green roof conditions, measure stormwater runoff, improve irrigation scheduling, and maintain healthy rooftop vegetation.

Key advantages of the system include:

• 24/7 web-based access to data
• All common green roof measurements: temperature, relative humidity, wind, soil moisture, light intensity, rainfall
• Plug-and-play sensors that enable easy deployment
• Customizable data display for kiosks
• Trend logging, monitoring, and alarm notifications

The system includes a HOBO U30 GSM-cellular data logger with one-year service plan, Smart Sensors for measuring rainfall, soil moisture, soil temperature, solar radiation, air temperature/relative humidity, and wind speed and direction, as well as mounting brackets and a 6-Watt solar panel. Optional mounting masts, tripods, graphing and analysis software, and additional sensors are also available.

Onset
www.onsetcomp.com