A damaged roof in Stowmarket won't wait - the sooner it's assessed and repaired, the less it costs to put right.
Call any time. Calls are answered day and night and passed straight to our roofers.
Roof repairs cover a wide range of work - from replacing a single slipped or broken tile to repointing a ridge, renewing lead flashings around a chimney, resealing a valley, or patching a flat roof section. The work is almost always quicker and cheaper than homeowners expect when it's caught early. Leave it, and water tracks through felt, soaks into timber and ruins ceilings and insulation, turning a straightforward repair into a much larger job.
Diss Roofers carry out all of these repairs across Stowmarket and the surrounding area. Whether the problem is a handful of lifted clay tiles after a windy spell, a cracked concrete ridge tile, a flashing that has pulled away from the brickwork or a flat roof section that has started to let water in, we can diagnose and fix it properly.
Slipped or broken tiles are the most frequent call. Plain clay or concrete interlocking tiles can slip when the nibs that hook them to the batten fail with age, or when the batten itself rots. A single missing tile exposes the roofing felt beneath - that felt was never designed to be the last line of defence and will not hold for long in wet or frosty weather.
Ridge and hip tiles are bedded in mortar, and that mortar cracks and loosens over time. Once it starts to lift, the tiles can rock or fall. Repointing the ridge - raking out the old mortar and repacking with fresh - is a routine job that should be done before any section becomes loose enough to slide off and cause damage below.
Flashings are the lead or code-metal strips that seal where the roof meets a chimney, a dormer, a parapet wall or a flat-to-pitched join. They are fixed into a mortar joint (called a chase) and dressed down over the tiles. When the pointing holding them fails, or when the lead has been pulled out by thermal movement over many years, water runs straight into the wall cavity. Renewing or re-dressing a flashing is a skilled job - the lead has to be properly soaked into the joint and sealed, not just stuck with mastic.
Gutters and fascias are closely related to roof health. A blocked or sagging gutter backs water up under the bottom course of tiles, soaking the felt and the wall below. If we spot a gutter issue while on a roof, we will flag it.
Flat roofs - typically felt or EPDM rubber on a bay window, a rear extension or a garage - can develop splits, blisters or perished seams. Felt roofs have a finite life and repeated patching eventually becomes false economy. EPDM rubber roofs tend to last considerably longer and are a common upgrade when a felt flat roof has reached the end of its life. A good temporary repair can buy time, but a worn-out flat roof membrane will need replacing rather than patching at some point.
Costs vary depending on the extent of the damage, the pitch and height of the roof, and the materials involved. As a guide, replacing a small number of slipped or broken tiles typically costs in the range of £150 to £400, depending on access and how many tiles are involved. Repointing a ridge or hip section runs from around £200 to £600 or more for a full ridge. Flashing repairs - re-pointing or renewing a chimney flashing, for example - commonly fall between £200 and £500 depending on the extent of the work and how much lead is needed. Flat roof patch repairs start from around £150 to £300, though a full felt or EPDM flat roof replacement for a typical bay or extension will cost from £800 to £2,000 or more depending on the size and system used.
These are honest UK market ranges, not fixed prices. An accurate figure requires someone to look at the actual roof. Any roofer quoting a precise price by phone or from a photo alone should be treated with caution.
From the ground, you can spot obvious problems with binoculars or even a camera on a phone with a good zoom. Visible gaps where tiles are missing, ridge tiles that look raised or out of line, or patches of dark staining on a chimney breast or ceiling inside are all signs that something needs investigating. Damp patches on a top-floor ceiling after rain, or a musty smell in the loft, both point to a repair being needed.
Getting into the loft on a bright day and looking for pinpricks of light coming through the felt or boards is another useful check. Water staining on the rafters or the underside of the felt shows where water has tracked - and the entry point is often not directly above the stain, since water travels along timber before it drips.
This is where many people are genuinely unsure. You've spotted a problem - maybe a tile came off in last night's wind, or a ceiling stain appeared after heavy rain. The repair is booked, but you have a few days to wait. What should you actually do in the meantime?
The most important thing is to get the loft space into a state where you can monitor what is happening. Move anything stored directly under the suspect area. Water tracking through a damaged roof might be a trickle, or it might be more significant - don't let valuable belongings absorb the damage while you wait.
Put a bucket or tray under any drip point you find inside. This protects your ceiling and your floor. If a ceiling is actively bowing with trapped water behind it - which you can usually see as a distinct bulge or darker wet patch - keep everyone out of the room and do not poke, prod or pierce it, as it can come down without warning.
Keep an eye on whether the damp patch is spreading. Take a photo with your phone, mark the edge of the stain lightly with a pencil and date it, and check it again 24 hours later. This information is genuinely useful to the roofer when they arrive - it tells them whether the problem is active or has dried out, and how fast water is moving through the structure.
If a tile has come off, it may still be on the roof slope or in the gutter. Leave it there - do not try to replace it yourself (see below). But do clear the gutter below the affected area if it is accessible safely from ground level or from a window, since a blocked gutter will make any ongoing water ingress worse.
If the weather forecast shows more heavy rain before the repair date, contact us to discuss whether temporary protection - a pitched-roof tarpaulin secured to the ridge and weighted at the eaves - is sensible given the extent of the problem. For a single missing tile this is rarely necessary. For a larger open area it can prevent significant interior damage.
Roof repairs are one of the areas where well-meaning DIY causes more damage than the original fault. The following is honest advice about where the boundary lies.
Falls from height are a leading cause of fatal accidents in the UK. A domestic roof is steep, the tiles are often slippery even when they look dry, and domestic ladders do not give safe access to a pitched roof without additional equipment - a roof ladder that hooks over the ridge, a second person holding the base and appropriate footwear at minimum. Even professional roofers set up proper access before they step on a roof. If you do not have these things, stay off.
The other risk beyond falls is that walking on a tiled roof without using a roof ladder damages far more tiles than it fixes. Concrete and clay tiles are brittle under point load - the weight of a person stepping directly on them, rather than on the lap or the batten beneath, can crack tiles that were perfectly sound.
This is genuinely dangerous. The gutter is not designed to bear a person's weight on a ladder, and reaching sideways from the top of a ladder to manipulate a tile is an unstable position that causes falls. Leave the tile where it is and wait for a roofer with the right access equipment.
This is one of the most common things we find that makes subsequent repair harder and more expensive. Silicone applied over a flashing, along a valley or around a chimney stack might stop a drip for a few weeks, but it skins over and traps moisture underneath, accelerates the deterioration of the mortar or lead beneath it, and has to be cut back before any proper repair can be done. It also makes it harder to see what the actual problem is. If you feel you must put something down temporarily, specialist roof repair tape - the type used by professional roofers - is less damaging than mastic, but it is still a temporary measure, not a repair.
Roofs that drip in heavy rain and seem fine afterwards are not fine. The water is still getting in - it is just evaporating or draining before the next episode of rain. Each time, it wets the insulation, the felt and the timbers a little more. Wet timber rots, wet insulation loses its effectiveness and compresses, and wet plasterboard and ceiling joists are expensive to replace. A repair that costs a few hundred pounds now prevents remedial work that can run to several thousand later.
You don't need trade knowledge to ask sensible questions. Before agreeing to any roof repair, it is worth asking the following:
A straightforward roofer will answer all of these without hesitation. Be cautious of anyone who is vague about materials, dismissive of questions, or who strongly encourages you to agree to a much larger job than you called about without showing you clear photographic evidence of why.
We work across Stowmarket and into the surrounding villages and towns. If you are in Stowmarket or in a nearby place like Eye, Harleston or Attleborough, the process is the same: call, we assess, we give you an honest price, we do the work properly. We also cover places closer to our base in Diss such as Scole, Pulham Market and the surrounding area.
If you have spotted a problem - or you just want a roof looked at because it has not been checked in years - arrange a roof survey with a qualified roofer, and ask them to tell you honestly what they find and what it will take to put it right.
No obligation · We'll call you to arrange a free visit
Call any time. Calls are answered day and night and passed straight to our roofers.
