With over three decades of experience in delivering stability to HVAC installations and rooftop projects, S-5!’s booth at the 2024 ARBS conference was a popular destination for anyone looking to solve real challenges pragmatically, but with great durability.
The company’s founder and CEO, Rob Haddock, shared his simple – yet compelling – philosophy towards the innovation that drives their success: “Our key mantra is to make it possible to mount things to metal roofs so that the fixing will last as long as the roof itself, and to preserve all the warranties inherent to this type of roofing,” Haddock said.
“Our tagline is ‘the right way,’ and it’s more than a tagline. It’s really our company ethos.”
S-5! has been developing new products that make it easier to mount a variety of applications to metal roofs, from satellite dishes and security cameras to solar arrays and HVAC equipment. Their objective is always the same – to create sustainable solutions that do no harm to the roof.
“We’ve innovated some solar mounting products that make it wonderfully easy and inexpensive to secure solar panels on the roof. And we’ve done the same thing for the mounting of split system air cons,” Haddock said.
The company’s commitment to innovation is evident in its impressive – and expanding – portfolio of patents.
“To date, our company is 33 years old, and we’ve been awarded 134 patents thus far. We have eight or 10, sometimes 12, patent applications into the US TPO at any given time. So we’re constantly innovating and inventing new attachment solutions,” Haddock said.
He highlighted one recent innovation that, simple as it sounds, was turning heads at ARBS 2024: a stackable metal mount that is a simple but creative way to level a unit on a sloped roof.
“You can use one of these on the low side to level up the unit if its a five degree slope If it’s above that, you can stack two of them together and get up to seven or eight degrees and still have a level unit,” Haddock said.
S-5! has also expanded its offering to include conduit clamps for capturing round shapes, integrating with their clamps and brackets or GripperFix system.
“We haven’t heretofore had a good way to marry round shapes to our other gear and now we do,” Haddock said.
Based in Colorado and Texas, USA, S-5! continues to grow in presence in Australia, and it’s for a simple reason: traditionally, mounting of systems on roofs had been a case of “whatever works,” Haddock said.
“People say ‘We have to mount this thing, how do we do it?,’ and in actuality the results are by hook or by crook,” he said.
In contrast, S-5! brings precision mounting solutions, providing superior stability and attachment that are waterproofed and tested to standards such as ASTM, E 2140.
With its commitment to doing things ‘the right way,’ S-5! has become a household name in the US, and the company continues to take great strides in redefining the industry standard here as well.