Factors to Consider When Evaluating a Building’s Quality

There are several factors to consider when evaluating the quality of a building. Color is one of the first things that a person sees, and mismatched colors can be quickly apparent. If two sides in the building do not match due to different paint batches, or the noticeable repainting of a side or part of the siding to cover a repair, quality becomes quickly suspect. With vinyl siding, even slightly out of specification colors can make a house look like a checkerboard; the seams become obvious everyone wants seamless color in the siding. Roof tiles should match even after replacement due to age or storm damage. The window frames and sashes need to match even if they come from different manufacturing lots. The same applies to glass office towners in the city, the windows must look the same if viewed close up or from a distance, and a slight color difference in a glass panel will be noticeable and degrade the appearance of the building.

The CM-5 spectrophotometer is the ideal instrument for measuring and analyzing color in building materials. The CM-5 can perform a wide range of measurements whether the material is solid, powder, paste, or liquid.

If you are measuring a solid material, place the sample on top of CM-5’s measurement aperture, much like putting a sample on a scale to get its weight. If a sample is a grout or stucco in a paste form, use a petri dish. Fill the petri dish with the sample, place it on the measurement aperture, and take a measurement.

In addition, the CM-5 has transmission measurement capability for the measurement of liquid and transparent materials such as glass and films. Place a sample in the transmittance measurement chamber of the instrument to take measurements. Measurements are quick, with just a few seconds to output and save spectral data. For glass and other transparent material analysis, besides color data, the CM-5 provides valuable data such as spectral transparency, absorbance, and haze.

With broad measurement capability for various materials, The CM-5 is the must-have instrument for the color quality of building materials in your lab.