WickRight and the Art of Drying Out a Wet Building

Every architect who works on masonry buildings knows the call. The parapet is spalling, the top courses are saturated, there is staining under the coping and mold in the top-floor units, and the roofer and the mason are pointing at each other. In freeze-thaw country, wet masonry is not a maintenance nuisance. It is a slow demolition.

Bob Kelly has spent more than 35 years on the other end of that call. A general contractor, master carpenter, and student of building science, Kelly built his career in Chicagoland pulling apart rotting roofs and walls and tracing where the water actually came from, which is often not where anyone assumed. What he kept finding was trapped moisture with no way out: walls and low-slope roof assemblies that got wet by design and stayed wet by default.

The fix he wanted did not exist. "I couldn't find anything at the supply stores, so I made it," Kelly says. The result became WickRight: a family of patented parapet and low-slope roof vents that let saturated masonry and roof assemblies exhaust trapped water vapor and dry out passively, without fans, power, or callbacks. Capstone, clay coping, and metal coping versions stop moisture from entering through the top of the wall while circulating air across it.

The record is the argument. WickRight vents are installed on more than 150 buildings across Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Tampa, Northern California, Ohio, and Michigan. Every one of those buildings is now dry. Since the first installation in 2013, WickRight reports zero callbacks. Six patents now cover the parapet and roof vent line, with more pending.

The inventing did not stop at vents. A winter job with rotted trusses produced the 365 Construction Tent, a heavy-duty rafter and shrink-wrap system that lets crews keep a flat roof dried-in and work through the season instead of opening and closing the roof every day. A truss reinforcement bracket system, developed so building owners would not have to move out during repairs, is patent pending.

For ALA members, the most useful thing about Kelly may not be the product line. It is that he answers the phone. WickRight provides forensic wet-building analysis, building envelope and roof consulting, repair design, and custom fabrication for architects, engineers, and contractors working on moisture intrusion problems. He will meet you at a jobsite, walk an active installation with you, and tell you what the wall is actually doing. Revit and CAD objects for the vent line are free on the WickRight site, and the company runs regular webinars and training for design professionals.

WickRight is an ALA Premier Partner, part of the small group of companies that stands behind ALA programming with accredited education and real technical support. This is what that partnership is for: putting members one phone call away from the person who has already opened up a thousand wet walls.

Product details, case studies, BIM files, and Bob's number are at wickright.com. Photography courtesy of WickRight.