London Flat Roofing. 154c Fleet Road, Hampstead, London NW3 2QX
As a company, we don’t use a naked flame on a roof, so we don’t use felt. No flames no fires. If we did I we still wouldn’t use mineral felt, felt only comes 1m wide, so you end up with lots of joints, joint means possible leakage at some time. We use EPDM rubber, its good and comes in large sheets, fewer joints fewer problems down the line.
We run a small charity in France. We have a small house where all kind of people find rest. The two box gutters are badly leaking. Professionals in France swear by zinc and tin.
As you can see when I went to look at this roof it was cold and snow was still around. Apart from the flashings being all over the place the roof looked quite flat, an easy one to overlay! If you look at the roof around the pipe in the center you can see that its cracked and the roof is actually leaking badly from this area, its very hard to get the old type felts to dress around details like the pipe.
When I first talked to the customer about the three roofs you see in the photos below, I was asked what material I would use, my answer was “Let the roof choose”! The roof and the customer’s circumstances should choose the roof covering.
100 years ago asphalt was the way forwards, revolutionizing the way we laid new flat roofs, and it was a good material. London is covered with old asphalt roofs, and today the problem we have with them is the cost of replacing them.
First we clean the old asphalt roof then we work on the old asphalt up-stands you can see we have replaced them with wood and straitened them out this will make the new flat roof look better but also make it easier for us to apply the SD650 liquid roofing system.
This is not a liquid EPDM or a liquid rubber, it’s some sort of mix. However without some form of reinforcement, we will not use it as a new roof covering.
Liquid rubber being laid over ply and felt. If you watched video 1 you would have seen the felt being fixed to the ply now you can see the liquid rubber being laid onto the ply and over the green mineral felt, the next video shows me ripping all the felt off the ply also shows the liquid rubber being stretched and taken of the ply.
Liquid rubber being laid over ply and felt. If you have watched video 1, you would have seen the felt being fixed to the ply, now you can see the liquid rubber being laid onto the ply and over the green mineral felt. The next video shows me ripping all the felt off the ply and also shows the liquid rubber being stretched and taken off the ply.
Stripping and re-laying the roof to the correct falls was an option the customer thought was too expensive, so it was decided that this flexible liquid roofing system would be used. The system is basically glass fibre ‘GRP’, but the resins have been modified especially for roofing applications like this roof. The end result is extremely satisfying, looks good and can come with guarantees of up to 25 years, depending on the layers we use to build up the covering.
