Inside a Professional RV Roof Resealing Service

Most of a professional reseal visit is unglamorous: hours of scraping and washing, then, almost as an afterthought, the part where new product goes on. That balance is the point. Here’s the whole visit, in order, including the corners that cheaper jobs cut.

What happens before an RV roof reseal visit?

The job starts with your photos. They show us the membrane type, how many vents and openings there are, and the state of the sealant. That way the van arrives with the right cleaner, primer, tape, and coating instead of a guess. We also watch the forecast. Sealant and coating need a dry roof, a dry day, and mild temperatures, so this work runs from late spring to early fall in Ontario. Sometimes a visit moves a day rather than gamble on rain.

Step one: inspect and photograph everything

Before a scraper touches anything, we document the full roof: every penetration, every seam, every earlier repair. It’s partly for your records, and partly because this is where surprises should come out. A soft spot near a vent changes the plan from resealing to a repair conversation, and finding it now beats finding it halfway through.

Step two: remove the failed sealant

These are the slowest, least photogenic, most important hours of the visit. Old cracked lap sealant comes off one bead at a time with plastic scrapers, so the membrane underneath survives. On roofs with years of patch-over-patch layers, that’s a lot of beads. Skipping this is the biggest difference between quotes. A fresh bead laid over cracked old sealant inherits every crack beneath it, usually within a couple of seasons.

Step three: wash and de-chalk

The roof gets washed with a cleaner that suits its membrane, and the chalk gets scrubbed back to a sound surface. Then the roof gets time to dry, checked with a moisture meter, not judged by eye. Coating over damp is one of the two classic ways coatings fail, and “washed and coated the same afternoon” is how it happens.

Step four through six: repair, prime, tape

Anything the inspection flagged gets repaired before sealing: tears patched, questionable spots sorted out. Primer goes down where the membrane and products call for it. Chalky EPDM and slick TPO both need it, for opposite reasons. Seams, end caps, and high-risk transitions get seam tape, so the coating has a backbone where roofs actually fail.

Step seven: two coats, with patience between

The coating goes on at the thickness the maker specifies. Thin looks the same on day one and behaves very differently in year three. Around every vent, skylight, and bracket it’s brushwork, not roller work. Then the first coat gets its full cure time before the second goes on. You can’t see that wait in the finished roof, but the roof depends on it.

Step eight: the photos you keep

The finished roof gets photographed the same way it was documented at the start, so you see what we saw, before and after. That’s useful for resale, for insurance conversations, and for keeping us honest.

When you’re comparing quotes, ask each company to walk you through their version of this list. The product names matter less than which steps are missing.