Commercial Roofing in Wokingham & Bracknell

Profiled cement sheet becomes brittle with age, and rooflights of the same vintage become brittle faster. Falls through fragile roofs and rooflights remain one of the largest single causes of death in UK construction, and on a 1960s industrial roof the assumption has to be that no sheet will hold a person's weight until proven otherwise.

In practice that means crawling boards or staging spanning the purlins, edge protection or a man-safe system, and rooflights covered or netted before anyone goes near them. It costs more than walking about on a roof, and it is not optional. Any quote for sheet roof work that does not mention access equipment is quoting for a method that should not be used.

Cement sheet fitted before 2000 must be treated as containing asbestos until sampling proves otherwise, and on Bracknell's older estates it very often does. That does not make a roof dangerous while it is intact and undisturbed — asbestos cement is bonded, not friable — but it completely changes what can be done to it.

Drilling, cutting or breaking those sheets is licensed work. Sampling comes first, then a decision: leave intact and manage, over-sheet above it, or remove under controlled conditions with consigned disposal. Over-sheeting is often the pragmatic answer, because it puts a new weatherproof skin above the existing roof without disturbing what is underneath, and it can usually be done while the unit keeps trading.

The newer half of the estates — the 1980s and 1990s units around Winnersh Triangle and the Bracknell fringe — is mostly coated steel profile, and its characteristic failure is cut-edge corrosion. The factory coating protects the face of the sheet but not the cut end at the eaves and side laps, and once rust starts there it creeps back under the coating and lifts it.

Caught early this is a cleaning-and-coating job at a fraction of the cost of resheeting. Left for another five years it is a resheeting job. It is the single clearest example in commercial roofing of maintenance being cheaper than repair, which is the argument for an inspection round rather than waiting for a leak.

Multi-bay industrial roofs drain into internal valley gutters that can run the entire length of a unit, and when one blocks the water has nowhere to go but through the roof line into the building. On the wider Bracknell units these gutters are long enough that a single autumn's leaf fall and a bird's nest at the outlet will do it.

Where the steel still holds its shape and only the seams weep, a bonded liner is usually the right answer — a seamless membrane taken up both sides and over the outlets, installed in a day or two per bay with no disruption below. Where the gutter itself has corroded through, it is a replacement, and that is a bigger conversation involving the roof sheets either side of it.