Storms that used to be annual news items now arrive in clusters, and older roofs across Berkshire and Oxfordshire are showing it. Install Roofing, a family-run roofing business covering the Reading to Oxford corridor, reports a busy autumn so far, with missing tiles, leaking flashings and blocked gutters accounting for most of the call-outs since late summer.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched a forecast turn. Wind lifts a tile that was already loose after a dry summer, rain follows through the gap, and the first sign for the household is a damp patch on a ceiling one or two rooms away from where the water got in. By then the timber in the roof structure has usually had days, sometimes weeks, of moisture.
Most of the damage is preventable with checks that take under an hour. The company’s surveyors point to three spots on a pitched roof that fail first: the valley where two roof planes meet, the flashing around chimneys and vent pipes, and the top course of tiles along the ridge. Flat roofs have their own tell, which is ponding water that has not drained away within a day of heavy rain.
Guttering sits at the top of the list for a simpler reason. A blocked gutter spills down the wall, and the repair bill for render and soaked plasterboard dwarfs the cost of clearing the gutter in the first place.
Install Roofing, which has more than ten years of experience across the region and offers free no-obligation surveys, handles everything from a single tile replacement to full re-roofs, including clay, concrete and slate pitched roofs and EPDM or fibreglass flat systems. It is fully insured and guarantees its work.
The practical advice from the trade is to book a survey before winter properly bites rather than after the first leak. Clear weather in November is the cheapest insurance a homeowner in the Reading, Didcot, Abingdon or Oxford area can buy.