Emergency Roof Repairs in South London

Most of the damage a roof leak does is done indoors, and most of it can be prevented in the time it takes us to load the van. None of this needs a ladder.

An emergency visit has one purpose: get the water out and keep it out until the roof can be repaired properly. What that takes depends entirely on what has failed.

The stain on your ceiling is rarely underneath the hole. Water runs along a batten and down a rafter before it drops, which is why leaks get chased and half-fixed for years. We work back from the stain — into the loft where there is one, along the run, then up onto the roof — and we photograph the path before we change anything.

Several repairs cannot be made in the wet, and a roofer who says otherwise is selling you a failure with a longer fuse. Bitumen will not bond to a damp surface. Mortar bedded in standing water, or below about 3°C, never reaches its strength. Resin and liquid coatings need a dry, primed substrate and hours of cure time. Torching felt onto a wet deck just steams the water and lets go a season later.

Wind is the harder limit. Much above 25 mph a sheet of covering becomes a sail and a roof ladder becomes dangerous, and we will not put anyone on a slope in that. When it is blowing like that the honest answer is that we make the inside safe, cover what can be covered from a ladder, and come back at first light.

A make-safe and a repair are two jobs, and we quote them as two jobs. Temporary cover is there to keep the house dry for days or a couple of weeks. It is not a season's worth of roof: sheeting degrades in UV, works loose at its fixings and eventually leaks on its own account.

Where the emergency repair can be the permanent one, we do it there and then and you pay once. That covers most slipped slates, most blocked valleys and a good number of flashings. Where it cannot — a stripped slope, a saturated flat-roof deck, anything that needs a scaffold — we cover it, quote the permanent work in writing with photographs, and book it for the first dry day.

Whether the call-out charge comes off the repair is worth asking when you ring. You should hear the answer before we set off, not read it on the invoice.

Sudden storm damage is normally within a buildings policy; gradual deterioration normally is not. The line between them is the state of the roof beforehand. A slate lifted clean off in a named storm reads as storm damage. A slope that has been shedding concrete tiles for three winters because the steel nails have rusted through reads as maintenance, and a loss adjuster can tell which is which from the fixings alone.

Most policies also require you to limit further damage, which is exactly what a make-safe is, so keep that invoice. We photograph the damage, the debris and the wider roof before we touch anything, and write the report in the terms insurers ask for. Harrington takes on insurance work regularly. Do not let anybody clear or strip the roof before the photographs exist, and that includes us.

We would rather tell you to go back to bed than charge you for a visit in the dark that changes nothing. Four things get reported as emergencies and almost never are.