When a large project is won by a smaller company, one of the items often overlooked is proper documentation of the drying process. Most companies are used to doing smaller commercial jobs routinely. However, when something on the order of a multi-story hotel shows up, the sheer size of the project and required timeframe by the owners, who want little to no downtime, overshadow the time allowed for detailed documentation. As such, the documentation is often left to waste. This is a huge mistake! When the hotelier wants to re-negotiate the bill after you are finished, you may have trouble proving the services provided (the scope of work). Now you are negotiating from a bad position, possibly without sufficient proof to fight, probably leaving you vulnerable in arbitration or court.

The S500 requires us to take daily moisture content readings and states that we should be charging for the labor to obtain this documentation. The concern on a large project is that highly detailed readings that you’re used to taking in a house can be very labor intensive, expensive and difficult to follow on a massive project. I have seen some reports that are more than 200 pages thick, but that is far superior to the many moisture maps I have seen when the restorer puts the readings on the fast food napkin from lunch!