Roof Repairs in Tauranga

A Leak Is Almost Never Where the Stain Is

This is the single most useful thing to know about a roof leak. Water gets in at one point, runs along a purlin, a rafter or the top of a ceiling until it finds somewhere to drop, and appears on your ceiling somewhere else entirely - often metres away, and often on the other side of a wall.

So the first job is not fixing anything. It is finding out where the water is actually getting in. We go up on the roof and into the roof space, look at where the water is tracking from rather than where it is landing, and work back to the source. It is the part that takes the time and it is the part that decides whether the repair works.

What we find is usually one of a handful of things:

• A failed flashing. Around a chimney, a skylight, a flue, a wall junction or a valley. Easily the most common cause.
• Fixings that have backed out or corroded. Each one is a hole through the roof, and a washer that has perished is a hole with nothing over it.
• A blocked or overflowing gutter. Water backing up over the top edge of the spouting runs behind the fascia and into the ceiling. It is a spouting problem that presents exactly like a roof leak.
• A previous bad repair. Silicone smeared over a problem instead of a flashing. It buys a year or two and then fails worse than the original fault.
• Condensation, not a leak at all. A poorly ventilated modern roof space can produce enough moisture to stain a ceiling. If we find this we will tell you, because no amount of roof repair will fix it.
• A genuinely failed roof. Sometimes the honest answer is that there is nothing left to repair.

Repairs We Do

• Leak investigation and repair on metal, tile and shingle roofs
• Flashing replacement - ridge, barge, apron, valley, chimney, skylight and penetrations
• Re-fixing and replacing corroded or backed-out fixings
• Replacing damaged or missing sheets, tiles and shingles
• Storm and wind damage, including making a roof safe quickly
• Spouting and downpipe repairs where they are the real cause
• Repairs to roof penetrations after a solar, satellite or heat pump install
• Rusted valley and gutter replacement

Repair or Replace?

We will always tell you which, including when the answer is the one that earns us less.

Repair when the roof itself is sound and the problem is localised - a flashing, a section of fixings, one damaged area, a valley. A good roof should not be thrown away because of one bad detail, and a repair on a sound roof is a fraction of the cost of replacing it.

Replace when the coating has failed across the whole roof, when the fixings are letting go in several places at once, when there is rust through in more than one area, or when you have paid for repairs more than once in the last few years. At that point repairs stop being the cheaper option, they just spread the same cost over more invoices. If that is where your roof is, see re-roofing.

If It Is Leaking Right Now

Ring rather than filling in a form - 027 535 1148 will get someone to you faster than an email gets read. In the meantime: put a bucket under it, and if there is a bulge in the ceiling plaster, put a container underneath and pierce the middle of the bulge with a screwdriver. That sounds wrong and it is right. A bulge is holding water and it will eventually let go all at once and bring the ceiling down with it. Draining it deliberately does far less damage.