How To Choose A Flat Roofing Company In Weston-super-Mare

Flat roofing is an unusual trade to buy from, because you will almost certainly never see what you paid for. It is above your eye line, it is invisible from the garden, and the parts that determine whether it lasts twenty-five years or six are buried under the covering where nobody will ever look at them again. That asymmetry is the entire problem. In most trades a bad job announces itself; here it stays quiet for four or five years and then appears as a stain on your ceiling, long after the firm that did it has changed its name.

So choosing well matters more than it does with almost any other work on a house. The good news is that the questions which separate a competent flat roofer from a chancer are not technical, and you do not need to understand membranes to ask them. Here are the eight we would ask if we were the ones standing in the kitchen with a quote in our hand.

Did anybody actually get on the roof?

This is the first question and it eliminates more firms than the other seven put together. The price of a flat roof is decided by two things, and both of them are hidden: how much of the timber deck underneath has rotted, and whether the roof still has enough slope to drain. Neither can be established from the ground, from a photograph you emailed over, or from a satellite image on a laptop.

A firm that gives you a firm number without going up has done one of two things. Either they have padded it heavily to protect themselves, in which case you are paying a premium for their reluctance to fetch a ladder, or they have quoted low and intend to revise it upwards on day two when they discover the decking. That second conversation always happens at the worst possible moment - your roof is open, your kitchen is exposed, and your negotiating position is somewhere near zero.

The related question is whether they looked underneath as well. On a roof with a loft hatch or an accessible ceiling void, the view from below tells you things the top surface never will. It costs ten minutes and it is the difference between a diagnosis and a guess.

Do all three quotes describe the same job?

Get three quotes, but do not compare the totals first. Compare what is in them. This is where most people go wrong, and it is entirely understandable - three pieces of paper with numbers on them look comparable.

Read them properly and you will often find they are quotes for three different jobs. One includes replacing rotten decking, one is silent on the subject. One specifies a three layer built-up felt system, one just says the roof will be felted. One includes insulation to meet current standards, one has quietly ignored the fact that the job triggers that requirement at all. The cheapest is frequently cheapest because something significant is missing from it, and the missing item does not stop existing - it just gets discovered later and invoiced separately.

A quote you can take apart is worth far more than a quote with a good number at the bottom. Deck, insulation, covering, trims and access should be separate lines, so you can see what each part costs and decide for yourself whether to do all of it now.

What is happening to the deck?

Ask this directly and listen carefully to the answer. “We’ll go over the existing” is the four most expensive words in this trade. Laying a new covering over an old one is fast, cheap and popular, and on the wrong roof it is how you buy a thirty year membrane and get eight years out of it.

The problem is that the old covering is hiding the thing that matters. On the 1960s to 1980s housing around Worle, Milton and Oldmixon - which is a very large share of the flat roofs in this town - the decking is frequently chipboard that has been slowly taking on water for years. It does not announce itself. It looks fine until somebody puts a knee through it. Cover it over and you have sealed damp timber underneath a waterproof layer, with no route out for the moisture, and the rot simply continues in the dark.

There are genuinely good reasons to overlay in some situations, particularly on larger commercial roofs where stripping is disruptive and the existing build-up is dry. What you want is a firm that has checked rather than assumed. If somebody proposes to overlay without ever having lifted a corner to look, they are quoting for the part of the job you can see.

Can they explain what went wrong?

If you are calling somebody out about a leak rather than planning a replacement, this is the test that matters. By the time they leave, you should be able to explain the fault to somebody else in your own words. A lap that has lifted. An upstand that has come away from the wall. An outlet packed solid with moss so the roof cannot drain.

If the entire diagnosis is that it needs sealing, nothing has been diagnosed. You are being sold a tube of something and a hope. And there is a particular version of this worth knowing about, because it catches people repeatedly: a roof that has been “repaired” twice already by firms who could not find anything wrong with it is often not leaking at all. It is condensation forming inside a cold deck construction, which behaves completely differently and is not fixed by anything applied to the top surface. We have written about how to tell condensation from a genuine leak separately, because it comes up constantly.

Who stands behind it, and for how long?

Flat roofing has a quirk that catches people out. Manufacturers offer long, impressive warranties on membranes - twenty years, thirty years, sometimes more - and firms enjoy quoting those figures because they sound like a guarantee on the work. They are not. They cover the sheet of material against manufacturing defect, and sheets of material almost never fail.

What fails is installation. The corner that was rushed, the upstand that was not carried high enough, the trim fixed with whatever was in the van. So ask the two questions separately: what does the manufacturer cover, and what does this firm guarantee about their own work? Get the second one in writing, before anybody starts, and read it. A firm that hesitates about putting a workmanship guarantee on paper has told you what they privately expect the roof to do.

While you are at it, ask to see the public liability insurance certificate rather than accepting a reassuring sentence in an email. There is no compulsory licence to fit a flat roof in this country, which is exactly why the voluntary stuff matters. Membership of a trade body such as the National Federation of Roofing Contractors, or registration with a government-endorsed scheme like TrustMark, is not a guarantee of quality on its own - but a firm that has bothered with either has at least been looked at by somebody other than you.

Does the job need building control, and do they know it?

Here is a question that will tell you a great deal about how seriously a firm takes its own trade. Ask whether your job triggers building regulations.

The answer depends on scale: replace more than a quarter of the roof’s surface and it counts as renovating a thermal element, which brings an insulation requirement with it. The full detail is in Approved Document L, and we have covered what building regulations mean for a flat roof in more depth.

The local wrinkle is which council you are dealing with, and it catches out firms from outside the area constantly. Weston-super-Mare, Worle, Uphill, Hutton, Locking, Clevedon, Nailsea and Portishead are all North Somerset Council. Drop fifteen minutes down the coast to Burnham-on-Sea, or over to Highbridge or Cheddar, and you are in Somerset Council territory - a completely separate unitary authority since April 2023. A roofer who confidently quotes you the wrong council’s process is telling you they do not work here often.

Are they going to leave your roof open overnight?

Ask what happens at the end of each day. On a domestic job the honest answer is that no more gets opened up than can be closed again before the crew leaves. On a commercial roof over a building full of stock, that principle is not negotiable.

Weston is, for what it is worth, drier than most of the country - around 914mm of rain a year against a UK average nearer 1,163mm. What it is not is sheltered. The prevailing south-westerly comes across the Bristol Channel and arrives with nothing at all in its way, and a tarpaulin held down with a few blocks is decorative rather than functional in that kind of wind. A firm that treats overnight weather protection as an afterthought will eventually be proved wrong on your roof.

Do they ever tell you not to bother?

This is the softest question and possibly the most revealing. A roofer who will look at your covering, tell you it has five years left in it, and decline the work has just had a worse afternoon in exchange for being trusted. That trade is one that only makes sense if you intend to still be working in this town in a decade.

The opposite pattern is worth watching for. If every quote you receive is for a full replacement regardless of what is actually wrong, get one more opinion from somebody willing to say the words “two hundred pounds” out loud. Of the leaks we go out to around Weston, a decent majority are worth repairing rather than replacing. That is not a generous view of the world, it is just what the roofs turn out to be when somebody looks at them properly.

And a final one, which is less a question than a rule: nothing about roofing should ever be agreed at your front door. Vans appear in the affected streets after every serious blow, offering to nip up and take a look while they are passing. Some of those callers are perfectly legitimate local firms. Enough of them are not that the safest policy is a blanket one - if you want your roof checked, ring somebody you chose yourself.

If you want somebody to come and stand on yours, that is what we do, and it costs nothing. Get in touch and one of us will come out.