Arad Bedek Bayit inspects public and commercial spaces, including office buildings, commercial centers, logistics warehouses, restaurants and shops, municipal buildings, Israel Police buildings, investment properties, portable structures, and any other kind of structure. Each inspection is tailored to the client's needs and the type of building.
Most of these buildings need a thorough check of their emergency systems, including a full integration test that runs through a range of emergency scenarios, on normal power and again with the power cut and the generator running.
Accessibility and safety get particular attention in most of these buildings: stair riser and tread dimensions, proper signage, emergency lighting, escape openings, corridor width, railing construction, and stairwells that double as protected escape routes, among other things.
Every building also gets its waterproofing checked. In a building with an underground parking garage, that means the details around pipe penetrations in the garage ceiling and the waterproofing of the garage walls.
A typical example: a faulty waterproofing detail where a pipe passes through a parking garage wall, the same kind of detail seen from the garage ceiling, and thermal-camera photographs showing dampness coming in through a parking garage wall and, separately, through a parking garage ceiling.
On a flat roof, the focus shifts to its many waterproofing details: watertight coping, pipe penetrations through the roof deck fitted with what is locally known as a "grandfather's cane" fitting to keep water out, watertight bases under the various rooftop fixtures, and more.
Typical problems include puddles forming because of a faulty slope in the roof's waterproofing, a fillet (rolka) laid without a reinforcing batten, and waterproofing done with bituminous sheets that have no fillet at all where they meet the wall, known locally as the "agalah": in that case, the sheets, which are meant to rise ninety degrees up the wall, will crack over time and let dampness in. These are just a small sample of what turns up in buildings of this kind.
The engineers of Arad Bedek Bayit, led by building engineer Ron Arad, whom courts appoint as their own expert on construction defects. The company has been inspecting apartments and buildings since 2001. Engineer Ron Arad · More about the company