London Flat Roofing. 154c Fleet Road, Hampstead, London NW3 2QX
This shows what can happen if the roofers are not trained in the flat roof material they are laying. The roofing market is now being flooded with good flat roofing materials, however if the roofer laying your new flat roof is not trained correctly the roof will not last.
Ply decking with torch on felt being applied over the top, ready for liquid rubber coating. When dry, I remove the liquid rubber and the mineral felt from the ply decking, showing how good the bond of the rubber is to the ply and the mineral felt.
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.
What is EPDM Rubber? Good question – I’m asked this all the time! EPDM is a manmade rubber that we use for all sorts of things around the house and in automobiles. However we also use EPDM on flat roofs and these EPDM rubber flat roof coverings have been used to cover roofs all over the USA for years.
The Kemper system is laid wet into a fleece, as you can see we’ve even covered the internal surfaces of the parapet walls on this job. By doing so we remove the need to use flashings, and the flashing details are normally what go wrong on a roof as it’s approaching the end of its lifespan.
London Flat Roofing investigated a leak caused by two old joined leaking roofs of different materials – plastic and corrugated asbestos. With no falls on one of the roofs and lots of details to dress around, we chose the Kemper V210 System. This is reinforced fleece saturated with a resin, and can be formed around most details; when completed there are no joints, therefore safeguarding against leaks.
One thing’s for sure, all the insulation on the roof will have to come out and we will have to probe the timbers to find out their moisture content before we can even think of re-roofing. We have our suspicions that not only was the vapour barrier not installed correctly on this roof, but the roof was also leaking in places. I will post more videos as the job progresses.
This roof is leaking or sweating, so we’ve been asked to make some inspection holes to see if we can determine the cause of the problem. We first noted that the falls on the roof are incorrect and inadequate, as water is puddling. For a 4 year old building, this is not a good sign. One of the things that kills a flat roof is incorrect falls, and that is the case here.
This flat roof is covered with a single ply roofing material and at the moment we don’t know if the roof is leaking or there is a problem with the vapour control barrier, we have to make holes all over the roof to assess the situation before our surveyors can work out what the exact problem may be.
This old mineral felt roof was covering ten garages. We stripped the old leaking mineral felt covering and removed all the old decking, fixed new joists then new decking with Sterling board (not ply). Then we re-roofed the garages using EPDM rubber as this is a long-lasting material with a lifespan of over 40 years, and is perfect for large open areas.