Pervious Concrete - Elevate Your Thinking

The Market at the Quay

Pervious concrete has been well established in slab on grade applications such as parking lots, pathways, sidewalks, driveways, and patios, but have you ever considered using pervious concrete on a second floor, or a roof?

Sustainable Concrete Canada is always challenged with new innovative applications for pervious concrete. Placing pervious concrete on a second floor, or roof, is an applications that is quickly gaining in popularity. With Hidro 600 in your pervious concrete you can successfully meet any desire for elevated pervious concrete.

Pervious Concrete Over Drainage Board

Presently the two most common conventional construction products used for second floor patio applications are paving stones and conventional concrete.  With these traditional materials the non pervious surface must be sloped to a surface drain, or for some paving stones the surface can be level, but the bottoms of the pavers must be shimmed to accommodate the sloped structure below which is quite labour intensive.

With both pavers & conventional concrete it is common for there to be a height differential at a doorway threshold, between the interior and exterior slabs, to ensure water ingression does not occur. With pervious concrete the two slabs can now be completely flush. Using a pervious concrete slab can therefore make any patio completely ADA accessible (handicap accessible).

Surrey Memorial Hospital

The following benefits can be realized with the use of pervious concrete on a second floor or roof:

• due to the reduced density of pervious concrete (approx. 20% reduction) there is a dead load reduction on the structure.
• there is no longer a need to slope the surface eliminating surface ponding and other elevation related issues. 
• Any patio furniture will sit level, such as in a commercial application like a restaurant. This will likely allow the landlord to get a higher lease rate for more net usable space, and the tenant more profit through the ability to have more table space and ultimately more customers.
• For a roof application you can use pervious concrete as a membrane ballast. With various techniques you can improve your SRI value for the roof. With PCC (noted below) you can choose the SRI value you wish to target.

Pervious Concrete & PCC

With the use of our PCC (Pervious Colour Coatings) product you can also add colour to any design to meet even the most artistic designer's imaginations.

The typical pervious concrete system section for an elevated application varies based upon the building / occupant usage below the elevated structure, but it typically consists of:

1. Elevated structure (Steel or Concrete)
2. Waterproof membrane
3. Insulation (where required)
4. Drainage board
5. Pervious concrete. 

Click here to see a short instructional video on this topic. Call us today to see how SCC and Hidro 600 can make your pervious concrete project a success.