Flat roofing in Peterborough

A lot of Peterborough's flat roofs went up in the same building push as the houses around them, which means a large share of the garage and extension roofs across Bretton, Werrington and Orton are original felt from the 1960s and 1970s. Felt has a working life of 20 to 25 years. Past that point it does not fail gradually, it fails at the seams and the upstands, usually after a spell of hard rain, and the first sign is a stain spreading across a garage ceiling or a bedroom above an extension.

We cover Peterborough regularly out of Wisbech, working the A47 route in both directions, and most call-outs here are for exactly that: a felt roof on a garage, a flat-roofed dormer, or a rear extension that was bolted on years after the house and never quite matched the pitch of the main roof. Hampton and the newer development around it bring a different job, fitting flat roofs to modern extensions where the brief is getting the detail right first time rather than replacing something failing.

What we fit instead of felt

Two materials do the job better than felt now and we use both, depending on the roof.

• GRP fibreglass. Fully bonded, no seams for water to find, 25 to 30 year lifespan. The standard choice for a garage or a flat dormer roof.
• EPDM rubber. A single membrane laid in one piece, flexible enough for roofs with awkward upstands or rooflights, similarly long-lived.
• High performance felt systems, where a lighter-duty roof or a tight budget calls for it, still well ahead of the old built-up felt it replaces.

Garage roofs are priced as: felt from £950, EPDM from £1,400, GRP from £1,700, depending on size and access. Larger extension flat roofs are quoted after the inspection, once we know the deck condition underneath.

What the inspection actually checks

We get up there, not just look up at it. That means checking the deck for soft spots where water has already been getting in, checking every upstand and abutment where the flat roof meets a wall or the main pitched roof, and checking the fall, the slight slope that should be carrying water to the outlet rather than letting it pool. A roof that ponds water in the middle is ageing faster than the calendar says it should, whatever it is made of.

Photographs go with the written price, so you are looking at your own roof, not a diagram, when you decide. There is a guide on spotting a dodgy roofer if you want to know what a proper inspection should look like before anyone else's van turns up.

Repair or replace

A single failed seam or a torn upstand on an otherwise sound felt roof can often be repaired rather than stripped out entirely, and we will say so if that is what we find. Ponding water and a soft deck usually mean the whole covering needs to come off, because patching a roof that has been letting water into the timber underneath is money spent on the wrong problem.

Every job carries our 10 year written workmanship guarantee, and £1,000,000 public liability cover, on top of whichever material guarantee applies. See our flat roofing service page for the full detail, or the Peterborough page for everything we cover in the city.