Roof repairs in Beacon Hill

Roof repairs

When a gale has had a go at the roof

If water is coming through a ceiling in your house now, ring 07435 839745 and say which room it is in.

Any of these is worth a call. A tile or a verge piece is lying on the drive after a blowy night. The felt in the loft has started drumming when the wind gets up, and there is a thin line of daylight at the eaves. Or a damp patch has appeared high on the gable wall inside after rain that came in sideways.

Thomas comes out, looks at each slope from the garden and the road, goes up where a roof ladder is safe and puts his head through the loft hatch. You get photographs of the fault and a written, itemised price for putting that one thing right. If the whole roof is past it, he tells you.

The repairs

Tiles, ridges and flashings that let go in a gale

Check what is on your own roof first. Concrete interlocking tile, clay plain tile and natural slate on the pitch, and felt, GRP or EPDM on a garage or extension, each fail in a different way.

Tiles lifted at the edges. Wind pulls hardest at the verges, the eaves course and the top courses under the ridge. On an older concrete tile roof, plenty of tiles were nailed only every few courses and hold on by weight and the interlock, so a gust can lift one out of its lock and drop it back crooked, or off. Sliding it back is not a repair. We lift the course above, set a sound tile of the same profile and fix it with a clip or a nail, which is the fixing against wind uplift that BS 5534 sets. Then we check the rest of that course and along the verge, because a gust that took one edge tile will have worked at its neighbours too. A handful of tiles is normally a morning from a roof ladder.

Ridge and hip tiles that rock. If your ridge is bedded in sand and cement, frost cracks the bedding, water gets in behind it and the wind finishes the job. You have two choices. Rebed the run in fresh mortar with a clip or screw through each tile, which keeps the present look. Or take the mortar off and fit a dry ridge over a ventilated roll, screwed down to BS 8612, with nothing left to crack. On a roof this exposed we lean towards dry fix, and the quote can price both. A ridge run is about a day.

Gable verges. A mortar verge loses its pointing from the outside first. Then wind driven rain gets in at the gable and turns up as a damp patch high on the end wall of a bedroom. A clip-on dry verge unit over each end tile, screwed into the batten ends, stops the mortar dropping out for good. Both ends of a gabled house can be done in a day.

Felt drumming in the loft. Under an older roof the bitumen felt goes brittle. In a gale it balloons and cracks between the rafters, and any rain that gets past the tiles tracks down to the eaves and onto the fascia. A tear in one bay can be cut out and new breathable membrane let in. If the felt crumbles wherever a tile is lifted, a patch only moves the leak along, and that section wants stripping and relaying.

Tiles sliding in groups. Several tiles creeping down one slope together means the nails or the battens have given up. That is nail sickness, and it is where a repair can turn into re-covering the slope, which is work for our roofers in Beacon Hill.

Lead and chimneys. Wind gets under the loose edge of a flashing, pulls it out of its mortar joint and folds it back. An old cement fillet against a wall cracks and lets water run down behind it. We re-dress or renew the lead, wedge it into a raked out joint and point it. On the stack itself, cracked flaunching round the pots and open joints let water in on their own; see chimney repairs. A set of chimney flashings is usually a day.

Flat roof edges. Wind finds a loose edge trim long before it tears the middle, so look for a trim standing proud or felt peeling back at the drip. More on flat roofing in Beacon Hill.

Leaks that are not the roof. A gutter full of leaves or a valley choked with debris overflows and can look exactly like a roof leak. Sometimes clearing it is the whole job; see fascias, soffits and guttering in Beacon Hill.

Repair or replace. One tile lifted in a storm is a repair. Tiles slipping across several slopes, felt perished right round the roof, or the same slope patched after every winter are the signs to talk about re-covering. Where it is close, both go on the quote side by side.

How it runs

From your call to a written price

One person to ring from the first visit to the last. The quote is itemised, not a figure on the back of a card: access, where the fault is and what is being opened up to reach it, each tile, slate, ridge or flashing being renewed and what with, making good, and disposal on separate lines, so you can compare it properly against anyone else's.

Nothing is left open or unusable overnight. The site is swept at the end of each day rather than the end of the job, and what comes out leaves with us. If something turns up once we start that nobody could have seen, you get a photograph and a price before we carry on.

Beacon Hill has no conservation area of its own and nothing on the national list of listed buildings, so putting back what was there needs no planning application. Planning Portal guidance on roofs explains where that line sits if you ever want a covering that looks different.

If it is leaking now

Water coming through a ceiling

Ring rather than use the form. Put a bowl under the drip, keep anything electrical away from the wet patch, and if a ceiling is bulging keep everyone out from under it. The first visit is about finding where the water gets in and making the roof weathertight, and the permanent repair is priced in writing once the fault can be seen properly. Tell us which slope and edge the wind took. Scheduled work runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. For anything urgent, ring rather than use the form, and if we cannot pick up we ring you back as soon as we can.

Call now: 07435 839745

Worth knowing

Up at eighty metres, fix it for the wind

The houses round Rushall Lane, Wimborne Road and Crumpets Drive sit at about 80 metres, where Upton down by the harbour is about 15. Open farmland and heath surround the village, so very little stands between a gale and your roof.

That changes the repair. A tile pushed back into place, or a ridge simply bedded on fresh mortar, has nothing but its own weight holding it down and can come straight off again in the next storm. So when we put back what the wind took up here, we fix it mechanically: clips on the tiles, screws or clips through the ridge and verge, lead secured at its edges, and flat roof trims fastened down. We also look at the edges that did not blow off, because they took the same wind.

For an insurance claim, photograph the damage from the ground and note the date; the three questions the Financial Ombudsman asks about a storm claim sets out what insurers look for, and we give you dated photographs and a note of what failed.

Nearby, and next door

Roof repairs near Beacon Hill

Nearby places we also cover for roof repairs, with straight-line distances from Beacon Hill, and the other trades we offer in Beacon Hill itself.

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