How Quickly Should a Leaking Roof Be Repaired After a Storm in Barry?

Two Clocks, Not One

The obvious clock is the water: what it is doing to plaster, insulation, timber and everything below. That one is real and it is covered below.

The clock people miss is the roof's. A roof that has lost material is not in a stable state waiting patiently for a repair. It has an open edge, and wind gets under open edges and works inwards. Each spell of weather takes a little more.

On a coastal roof with corroded fixings that process runs faster, because the material either side of the gap is held by nails in the same condition as the ones that just let go. The second failure is not a risk. It is queued.

The Water Clock: What Happens and When

Immediately

Water reaches whatever is directly beneath. If that is a light fitting, a socket or a consumer unit, it is an electrical problem before it is a roofing one — turn that circuit off at the board if you can do it safely.

Within hours to a day

Insulation soaks and stops insulating, and it stays wet for a long time afterwards because there is little airflow around it. Plasterboard begins to absorb, and once saturated it usually has to come out rather than dry out.

Within days

Ceilings stain and can begin to sag. A ceiling holding trapped water is heavier than it looks and it can come down without warning.

Within weeks and beyond

Repeated wetting and drying of roof timbers puts them on a path towards rot, and rot is not a roofing repair. This is the line worth spending money to stay on the right side of.

There is a coastal wrinkle here too. Water driven in off the Channel carries salt, and salt stays in the plaster and masonry after the water has gone. Salts in a wall draw moisture back out of the air, so a wall that has been repeatedly wetted can remain damp long after the leak is fixed, and the staining is harder to cover.

So: How Quickly, Honestly

• Now. Water near electrics, a ceiling bulging with water, anything loose above a place people go, or daylight through the roof.
• Within days. An active leak into a room, a gap with no underlay beneath it, or any loss of material with more weather forecast.
• Within a couple of weeks. A gap over intact underlay with nothing coming in, on a roof whose other fixings look sound.
• Planned. Damp that is not growing and appears only in driven rain from one direction, with nothing loose.

What is not on that list is "leave it until spring". An open roof does not hold steady over a winter on this coast. Underlay exposed through a gap perishes in wind and sunlight, an unrestrained tile takes its neighbours, and salt-bearing water saturating a wall head does not dry out between events.

What You Can Do While You Wait

• Keep the ground below clear, and check it again after every spell of wind rather than once
• Photograph the damage now and again if it changes, so the sequence is recorded with dates
• Ring your insurer early and ask what they need before any permanent work
• Move anything of value out of the room below a leak
• Check the loft after each spell of rain, if it is safe, to see whether it is worsening
• Watch the downpipes from the ground during rain — if water is going over a gutter rather than down the pipe, tell us, because that may be the actual problem

If anything changes for the worse, ring back. A priority order set on Monday is not binding on Thursday.

What a Make-Safe Should Actually Consist Of

Since the make-safe is what holds the line until the repair, it is worth knowing what a good one looks like — and it is one of the things most commonly done badly.

• Sheeting of the right weight, not a builder's tarpaulin. Light sheeting flogs itself to pieces in a coastal wind within days.
• Fixed to something structural — battens, timbers, the roof itself — rather than weighted down with blocks. Anything held by weight alone is a sail waiting for the next gust.
• Dressed over the ridge or the top edge so water runs off it rather than under it. Sheeting that stops halfway up a slope channels water straight into the gap it was meant to cover.
• Edges secured all round, because one loose corner is all wind needs.
• Loose material removed, not covered over. Sheeting laid over tiles that are already unrestrained takes them with it when it goes.

If somebody has already made your roof safe and it has blown off, that is a common call-out and it usually means one of the five above was skipped. Ring us and we will look.

Why the First Visit May Not Be the Repair

In poor weather the sensible sequence is to make the situation safe and limit further damage, then return to do the job properly when the roof is dry enough to work on.

That is not being fobbed off. Mortar will not cure in the wet or the cold, lead needs to be dressed onto a dry surface, and a repair carried out in the wrong conditions fails — which means paying for it twice, including the access. What you should get is a clear statement of which of the two has been done and a date for the other.

T & T Roofing South Wales covers Barry from our base in Neath. After a named storm a great many people call at once and we prioritise by risk, but you will get an honest answer about when rather than a convenient one.