Roof leak detection & repair in Macclesfield

Water almost never comes in directly above where it shows. It gets through a defect, runs along the top of a batten, down a rafter and across a ceiling joist, and drops through the plaster at the first low point it finds. A stain in the middle of a bedroom ceiling routinely traces back to a flashing three metres away at the other end of the roof.

So a leak is a diagnosis job before it is a repair job. It means looking in the loft with the light off to find daylight and water tracks, following the staining back up the timbers, checking the obvious suspects in order — flashings, valleys, the chimney, the abutments — and only then getting on the roof.

Not every wet patch is a leak, either. Condensation in a poorly ventilated loft produces exactly the same symptoms — damp insulation, black mould on the sarking, water dripping off nail points on a cold morning — and re-covering the roof will not fix a single bit of it. Telling the two apart is the difference between a hundred-pound vent and a five-figure re-roof.

One local note worth being straight about: Cheshire East's flood risk assessment names Macclesfield as the borough's only designated Flood Risk Area, with 47 internal flooding incidents recorded since 2011 — more than any other town in the borough. A good share of what people report as a roof leak in the streets around the culverted watercourses turns out to be groundwater or an overwhelmed drain, and it is worth ruling that out before anybody starts pricing roof work.