Knowledge base for roofers and sheet-metal workers when someone on the roof asks which metal is up there.

The handover – not the invoice date and not the day the crew left. For work on a building, the Austrian Civil Code (ABGB) sets a period of three years from handover, unless the contract says otherwise. You ask by address; if the handover record is in the knowledge base, the answer gives its date with the source, alongside the final invoice and the correspondence from the time. Whether storm damage is a warranty case at all, or an event nobody is liable for, is not for the system to decide – that assessment is yours. If it finds no record for the property, it tells you so.

You ask for the passage, not the document: minimum pitch for this tile, seam width for this membrane, fixing requirements in the edge zone. The answer gives the paragraph with its page number, so you can look it up. In the first weeks after go-live, ask questions you know the answers to and see whether the right passage comes up from your guidelines. The system doesn’t fetch a new version from the web on its own – whether it may go online at all is your setting: not at all, only after asking you in the chat, or without asking. When the manufacturer issues a new guideline, you add it; the old one stays in the knowledge base, because the roofs of that time were built to it, and that is exactly what you have to show if there’s a complaint.

That depends on whether the documents are in the knowledge base. Under the Austrian Construction Work Coordination Act (BauKG), a file for later work must be prepared for buildings; it explicitly covers features such as access routes and anchor points, and the building owner must keep it for as long as the building stands. Whether they can still find it is another matter – but you can search your own copy if it’s on file, even as a PDF attached to an old manufacturer email, provided the mailbox is included. Ask about the property and the answer gives the location and type of the anchor points and the date of the last inspection record, as far as they are documented; if the system finds nothing, it tells you so. Under the Austrian PPE Regulation (PSA-V), personal fall protection equipment must be inspected by a competent person at least once a year; the interval for a permanently installed device on the roof is set by its manufacturer. Nothing is calculated here – what you see is what is documented.

Photos can go into the knowledge base and be searched by property and period. The picture of the seam, of the junction with the chimney or of a smoke vent’s rating plate is often the only evidence of a piece of work – especially for everything that later disappears under metal. The system suggests property and date; with phone pictures, the date taken is in the file anyway. How well photos can be found by what they show is worth checking with your own pictures in the first weeks after go-live. You confirm once what kind of picture it is: a damage photo a customer sends you and your own installation photo shouldn’t be visible to the same people.