Tesco, Barrow-in-Furness
A 4,200 m² IKO Armourplan overlay on a live, trading Tesco superstore — installed without closing the building. Two months of careful placement, live-store logistics, and Leister Varimat-welded seams across the full roof.
- Client
- Tesco
- Location
- Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria
- System
- IKO Armourplan PVC single ply (overlay system with fleece separation)
- Area
- 4,200 m²
The Challenge
The roof was a substantial single ply system, but past its sell-by date and starting to fail in places. Tesco needed it replaced — without closing the store, without disturbing customers, and without making the trading floor feel like a building site. The practical constraints stacked up fast. Material weight: the IKO Armourplan rolls come in at around 50 kg each. Drop one carelessly onto a metal deck and the bang carries straight through to the shop floor below — not a noise a shopping family wants to hear over the freezer aisle. Logistics: material had to be loaded onto the roof from a compound we set up in the customer car park, in and around live shopper traffic, deliveries, and trolley collection. Working envelope: every operation overhead of an open public space — no margin for dropped tools, no margin for unplanned noise, no margin for hot-work risk.
Our Solution
Rather than strip the existing single ply (which would have meant exposing the deck above a live store), we specified an overlay system: a fleece separation layer over the existing membrane, then a fresh IKO Armourplan PVC roof fully welded over the top. The fleece isolates the new membrane chemically and mechanically from the old, preventing any plasticiser migration and giving the new system its full warranted service life. Seams were welded using the Leister Varimat IV — the industry-standard automatic hot-air welder (known on site as "the dog" because it rolls itself along the lap on a guide arm). Hand welds on every detail: upstands, parapets, penetrations, every change of plane. Material placement was choreographed deliberately slowly. Rolls were lowered onto the deck, not dropped. Movement across the roof was coordinated with the store team so any unavoidable noise happened during quieter trading windows. The car park compound was relocated daily to match Tesco's deliveries schedule and customer flow.
The Outcome
2 months on site, store traded normally throughout. No closures, no customer complaints about noise, no incidents involving the car park compound. The full 4,200 m² roof was handed over with the IKO manufacturer warranty registered and a clean documentation pack for Tesco's facilities team. Five years on, the roof is still watertight and performing as specified.
This was a textbook example of why overlay systems matter in commercial flat roofing. Stripping a 4,200 m² single ply roof would have meant exposing the deck — and the live trading floor below — to weather and noise for weeks. The IKO Armourplan overlay with fleece separation gave Tesco a brand-new manufacturer-warranted roof in the same footprint, with zero trading disruption and a fraction of the disposal cost.
The overlay route is not always the right answer — it depends on the deck condition, the existing membrane’s chemistry, and whether the building can carry the modest extra weight. On this roof, all three boxes ticked. The IKO system was the right specification, the fleece interlayer was the right detail, and the live-store logistics were what we are set up to handle.
The job, in photos
Spec, scope & references
- Main superstore roof (overlay over existing single ply)
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