Leaks, storm damage, damp lofts, slipped slates, chimneys, guttering, planning and Building Regs — and the questions people ask about us before they let a roofer near the house. Each one has its own page, answered properly, with no invented urgency.
Answers
48 answers, sorted by the thing that's actually gone wrong. If yours isn't here, describe it on the quote form and your roofer will talk it through with you.
Yes. For water coming into the house, storm damage or anything loose overhead, choose "Emergency roofing" as the job type on the quote form and your job is prioritised for the fastest call back we can manage. The first visit is usually about making the roof safe and watertight — the permanent repair follows once the weather allows.
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Turn off the electrics to any circuit where water is near a light fitting, get containers under the drips, and move what you can. If a ceiling is bulging, pierce the low point of it over a bucket rather than letting it fall. Then photograph everything and ring a roofer — and do not go up a ladder to look.
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Please don't. Walking on a roof breaks tiles and slates, and falls from height are the commonest cause of serious injury in this trade — worse on a wet or storm-damaged roof, which is exactly when people are tempted. Anything worth seeing can be photographed from the ground with a phone camera on zoom.
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Photograph everything from the ground before anything is moved or tidied, note the date, and check whether anything loose is hanging over a path or a car. Then get it made safe and report it to your buildings insurer. Do not go up to look, and do not accept help from anybody who turns up unasked.
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Storm damage, impact damage and a tree coming down are covered by most buildings policies, subject to an excess. Gradual wear and tear is not — so a roof that was already at the end of its life will not be paid for. The difference is what insurers investigate, and an honest claim is the one most likely to be settled without argument.
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Because on most older roofs they are held on by mortar alone, and mortar on the most exposed line of the building cracks through freeze-thaw and thermal movement. Since BS 5534 was revised in 2014, mortar on its own is no longer an accepted fixing — ridges, hips and verges must all be mechanically fixed as well.
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Frost and wind, both of which increase sharply with height. The Met Office records around 20 air-frost days a year on the North West coast against over 75 in the higher Pennines, with about half a degree of cooling per hundred metres — and freeze-thaw is precisely what destroys mortar bedding and spalls porous tiles.
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From inside first. Water enters at a defect, runs along the top of a batten or down a rafter, and drops through the ceiling somewhere else entirely — so the entry point is always higher than the stain and often several metres away. The loft shows the water tracks, and those lead back to the source.
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Condensation shows on cold, clear mornings rather than during rain, spreads widely across the underside of the roof instead of concentrating in one place, and comes with black mould and damp insulation. A leak follows rain and has a track running from a single entry point. It matters enormously, because a new roof will not fix condensation.
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Usually because something is being overwhelmed rather than because there is a hole. An undersized or partly blocked valley or gutter backs up above the level of the laps and lets water in sideways, and wind-driven rain gets past a headlap that is perfectly adequate in ordinary weather.
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Yes — a cold roof space needs air in low at the eaves and out high at the ridge, or the moisture rising from the house condenses on the underside of the roof. Blocked eaves are the commonest cause of a damp loft, and the usual culprit is loft insulation pushed into the gap.
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Almost always condensation rather than a leak — warm moist air from the house rising into a cold roof space that has no way to vent it. Damp insulation performs far worse than dry, so it is costing you heat as well as rotting the timbers, and the fix is ventilation rather than roofing.
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A gutter that is blocked, dropped or leaking puts a continuous curtain of water down the wall all winter, and a saturated wall shows as damp inside. The other common cause is a split at the back of a downpipe, which sprays into the masonry every time it rains and is invisible from the front.
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Most 'leaking' roof windows are condensing rather than leaking — glass is the coldest surface in the room and humid air runs off it onto the sill. Where water genuinely is getting in, it is nearly always the flashing kit rather than the window, and it typically shows at the top corners.
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Repair if the failure is local and the fixings and battens are sound. Replace if the roof is losing slates or tiles from several different places at once, because that means the nails or the battens have failed everywhere and patching is renting time. The answer comes from the loft as much as from outside.
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The slate itself will do a century and often considerably more — it does not absorb water and it does not degrade in frost. What ends a slate roof is the fixings: original iron nails typically start failing somewhere between eighty and a hundred and twenty years, which is why so many roofs in this town are being stripped and re-laid now.
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Concrete interlocking tiles are generally quoted at around a sixty-year design life, and clay tiles considerably longer. But on both, the nails and battens usually fail before the tiles do — so a roof that looks even from the pavement can be at the end of its life underneath.
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Many old roofs have carried a gentle dip for a century with no consequence at all — settlement in a Victorian roof is normal. What matters is whether it is moving. A dip that has appeared or deepened in the last few years is a structural question and needs looking at properly.
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It depends on the property, and any answer that is the same for every house is a subscription rather than a schedule. With trees over the roof, clear the gutters annually and look at the roof every couple of years. On the exposed ground east of the town, after a hard winter. A sheltered modern roof in good order can genuinely go several years.
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Less than you are usually told. On a sound slate roof it is largely cosmetic. What it genuinely does is block the gutters — moss is the main gutter-filler on most local roofs — and hold water against porous tiles, which in a frost pocket takes the face off them. Worth dealing with; not an emergency.
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Generally no. A coating does not restore a worn tile, it can trap moisture in the covering, it makes future individual repairs harder, and surveyors frequently flag it at sale. Most importantly it does nothing at all about corroded nails or rotten battens, which is what actually ends a tiled roof.
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It can be a serious one. Foam applied to the underside of a roof can trap moisture against the timbers, it makes the roof structure impossible to inspect, and it can make a future re-roof considerably more expensive. A number of lenders and surveyors take a firm line on it at mortgage and valuation stage.
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It depends entirely on what it is made of. Old three-layer bitumen felt managed ten to fifteen years; modern EPDM rubber and GRP fibreglass are typically warranted for twenty years or more with a realistic service life well beyond that. What actually decides it is the falls — standing water finishes any flat roof early.
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For a plain rectangular extension or garage, EPDM rubber is usually the simplest and best value — one sheet, no joints, no flame, and it goes down in a day. For complicated shapes, upstands and roofs that are on show, GRP fibreglass is generally better because it cures as one seamless laminate including the edges.
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Because the repairs are being made to the field of the roof when the failure is at a detail — an upstand, a seam, the outlet or the perimeter trim. Standing water is the other reason: it means the falls were never adequate, and ponding accelerates every failure mode there is.
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If it is grey corrugated cement sheeting and it went on before the mid-1980s, very probably. Modern fibre cement looks similar and is not. It is not dangerous while it is sound and undisturbed — the risk comes from breaking, cutting or dropping it, and where anyone is going to work on it the answer comes from a sample and a test rather than a guess.
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Three usual causes: water coming down the stack because the flaunching or pointing has failed, water coming in at the flashing where the stack passes through the roof, or — very commonly — a disused flue that was capped without being ventilated and is now sweating from the inside.
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If the stack serves nothing and you have no intention of a fire again, removing it down to below the roof line is often cheaper than rebuilding and removes the maintenance permanently. The arguments for keeping it are appearance, the option of a fire later, and planning constraints on a listed or conservation-area property.
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Correctly specified and correctly sized, a very long time — a century is realistic on a well-detailed roof. Lead that fails in ten or fifteen years has almost always been laid in pieces that were too long, so thermal movement fatigued and split it. That is a workmanship failure, not a material one.
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Annually if there are trees over the roof or heavy moss on the covering — and in this area moss off the roof, not leaves, is what usually fills them. On an exposed roof with nothing overhanging, every two or three years is honest. Late autumn is the right time, before the wet season rather than after it.
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Very possibly not you. Since 1 October 2011, drains and sewers shared between properties transferred to the water company — so in a terrace, where your drain joins next door's before reaching the sewer, a blockage past that junction is normally United Utilities' to clear at no cost to you.
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Not much while the nest is active, and that is the law rather than a preference — wild birds, their eggs and their nests in use are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. Once the nest is finished with, the entry point gets closed properly, which nearly always means repairing the defect that let them in.
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Usually not for a like-for-like re-cover, which is normally permitted development. It changes where permitted-development rights have been removed — Macclesfield has conservation areas across the town centre and beyond, with Article 4(2) directions at Christ Church and High Street — and a listed building needs consent whatever the material.
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Yes, once you replace more than 25% of the roof covering. At that point Part L treats it as renovating a thermal element, which brings a duty to improve the roof's insulation where feasible, and the work has to be certified — either through Cheshire East Building Control or by a roofer registered with a Competent Person Scheme.
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For work to a shared chimney stack or a party parapet, yes — that is a party structure and the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 requires two months' written notice. For ordinary roof covering work it usually does not apply, but if a scaffold has to stand on or oversail their land you need their agreement anyway.
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For anything more than a brief, low-risk task, yes. The Work at Height Regulations 2005 require suitable access and edge protection, and a full re-roof, chimney work or a gable end cannot be done safely or properly from a ladder. On a terrace fronting the pavement, the scaffold also needs a licence from Cheshire East.
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We don't publish prices, because a number pulled out of the air is worse than no number at all — your roofer has to honour it. What we can tell you is what actually drives the cost: access, whether a scaffold is needed, and whether the fault is local or a symptom of something systemic.
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We don't publish a figure, because the range is so wide that any number would mislead more than it helps — and your roofer has to honour whatever is quoted. The things that actually decide it are the size and complexity of the roof, the covering, the access, and what is found once the strip starts.
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Three things: it is probably Welsh slate on original iron nails, so nail sickness is the likely eventual failure; the chimney stack is probably shared, which brings the Party Wall Act into any work on it; and there is often no private ground at the front for a scaffold, so it goes on the pavement under a council licence.
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It depends enormously on which part of town. The pre-1919 centre is largely Welsh slate on iron nails. The postwar estates on the edges are concrete interlocking tile now at the end of a roughly sixty-year design life. The hill villages have stone slate and clay as well. They are close to different trades.
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The aim is the same day, and emergencies are prioritised. Because the patch is deliberately small — SK10 and SK11 only — that is a realistic promise rather than a sales line. You get one call, from the roofer who would actually do the work.
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The single most reliable rule: never let anybody onto your roof who turned up unasked. Doorstep roofing is where nearly all of the harm in this trade happens. Beyond that — get it in writing, ask for photographs of the actual defect, never pay large sums up front, and get a second opinion on anything expensive.
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No. Your details go to one local roofer — the one who would actually do the work — and to nobody else. There is no bidding, no panel of trades, and your number is never sold on. You should get exactly one call.
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No. The quote is free and there is no obligation either way — getting a callback does not commit you to anything. What is a separate, chargeable service is a written condition survey with photographs, because that is a report you keep rather than a price for work.
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Everything from a single slipped slate to a full re-roof — pitched and flat, slate, tile and stone, chimneys and leadwork, guttering and fascias, roof windows, and storm and insurance work. Small jobs are welcome; they are usually the ones that save the most money.
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If you are in SK10 or SK11 — Macclesfield and the villages that belong to it — then yes. The patch is deliberately small, because that is what makes a same-day callback a realistic promise. Put your postcode in the form and you will be told straight away.
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One independent local roofer does the work — the same person who calls you back after you send the job over. We run the website and pass your job to them; we are the introducer, not the roofer, and that distinction is set out properly in the terms.
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Insurance is checked as part of vetting, and you are entitled to ask to see the certificate before work starts — a genuine roofer will produce it without hesitation. Public liability is the one that matters most to a homeowner, and any work involving employees also needs employers' liability.
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Tell us what you need and it goes straight to our Macclesfield roofer — one callback, usually the same day. The quote is free and there's no obligation.