Professional Roof Cleaning in Accrington

Fifteen minutes over the hill

We are based in Haslingden, which is the next valley across. That matters when you want someone to actually come and look at the roof rather than price it off a photograph you sent. Accrington, Oswaldtwistle, Church, Clayton-le-Moors, Huncoat and Baxenden are all comfortably inside our normal working day, and there is no travel charge on any of them.

A terraced town, and what that means on a roof

Accrington is a good deal bigger than people assume, with close to 39,000 residents across roughly 15,000 households at the last census, and large parts of it are solidly terraced. Rows of terraces share a continuous roofline and a shared gutter run, which changes the job in two ways. First, moss and debris travel: a neglected roof three doors down will keep seeding yours. Second, the gutter between you and next door is usually the first thing to block, and it is the one nobody can see from the street. We clear the full run while we are up there rather than stopping neatly at your boundary.

Conservation areas and older materials

Hyndburn has ten conservation areas, and two of them, Accrington Town Centre and Christ Church, sit inside the town itself. Others cover Rhyddings and The Straits over in Oswaldtwistle, and Church Canalside down by the water. The council’s own wording is that these designations protect the historic street pattern and the characteristic materials. On those streets the roofs tend to be original slate on older timbers, and high pressure is the fastest way to ruin both. We steam and soft wash, keep the pressure off the slate, and tell you if the ridge mortar has gone rather than washing over it.

Why Accrington roofs green up so quickly

The town sits at the western edge of the Pennines and catches the weather coming in off the hills. Add north-facing pitches on tightly packed terraces that get very little winter sun, and you have ideal conditions for moss, algae and lichen. It is why a roof here can look a decade older than the same roof laid the same year somewhere flatter and drier. The fix is not a harder clean, it is a proper biocide treatment that keeps working after we have gone.

Why a scrape on its own is money wasted

Someone comes with a scraper, charges a couple of hundred, and the roof looks sound for a season. Then it comes back worse. Scraping takes off what you can see and leaves the spores and the root in the surface of the slate or tile. In this climate an untreated roof is green again inside two seasons. The treatment is the part that buys the years, which is why every roof we do gets a DDAC biocide across the whole surface, including the parts that already look clean, and carries a 2-year no-moss guarantee.

Everything is fixed price and written down before we start. See roof cleaning for the full method, gutter cleaning if the gutters need doing at the same time, or our reviews for what people locally say about the work.