Professional Roof Cleaning in Manchester

City roofs: less rain, more grime

Manchester is actually drier than the Pennine towns around it, closer to 870mm a year than the 1,200mm you get up the valleys. That does not make the roofs cleaner, it just changes what is on them.

City roofs carry a heavier load of traffic film and airborne grime alongside the biological growth. That fine oily deposit off the road network settles on everything and gives algae something to hold on to, so the two problems feed each other.

The upshot is that a Manchester roof often looks dirty rather than green, and needs both the grime and the growth dealing with.

Tree-lined avenues and what they do to a roof

The thing that really drives moss in south Manchester is the trees. Didsbury, Chorlton, Withington and Whalley Range have mature street trees and big garden trees everywhere, and they do two things to a roof.

They shade it, so it dries slowly. And they drop several months of leaf litter onto it, which collects in the valleys, behind chimney stacks and along the bottom courses, holds water and rots down into exactly the sort of organic bed moss likes.

If you have a large tree overhanging the roof, expect to be on a three year cycle rather than five, and to want the gutters doing every autumn without fail.

Victorian slate and interwar semis

Manchester housing splits fairly cleanly. The Victorian and Edwardian terraces and villas through Levenshulme, Rusholme, Chorlton and Didsbury are natural slate on timber, often original.

The 1930s semis that ring the city, and the post-war estates further out towards Wythenshawe and Gorton, are concrete or clay tile. Concrete is the one that cannot survive bad cleaning.

On old slate the main risk is the fixings. Nails corrode, and a roof that has carried heavy moss for fifty years usually has slates that are only being held in place by their neighbours. We note and photograph anything we find.

Soft washing and biocide, never pressure

Growth is removed by hand and with steam, worked from a roof ladder with the operative harnessed. Then the whole roof gets a DDAC biocide, which kills what is left in the surface and keeps working for months.

No high pressure, ever. On Victorian slate it cracks and dislodges tiles that are already only just holding on. On concrete it removes the surface coating and makes the regrowth worse than the original problem.

Two year no-moss guarantee on every roof we treat.

Access in tight terraced streets

Access is the part of a Manchester job that needs thinking about before the day, not on it. Terraced streets with no rear vehicle access, narrow back entries, on-street parking and neighbours either side all affect how the work gets done and how long it takes.

We work it out at survey stage, including where the van goes and whether we need to speak to a neighbour about access over their yard. It is far better sorted in advance than argued about with a ladder on your shoulder.

Where a roof genuinely cannot be reached safely from ladders we will say scaffold is needed and price it before you commit, not after.

Didsbury, Chorlton and the leafy side

The south Manchester suburbs are the ones we are in most often, and almost always for the same reason: shade and leaf fall from mature trees, on large Victorian roofs with complicated pitches, valleys and dormers.

Valleys are the critical bit on those roofs. A blocked valley gutter full of leaf litter and moss will put water into the building far quicker than a mossy pitch ever will, and it is the thing most people never look at.

Gutters, and why they matter more here

With that much leaf fall, gutters are not an optional extra in Manchester, they are half the job. Every roof clean includes clearing them and running the downpipes through.

See gutter cleaning in Manchester for the detail. If the render or the drive want doing in the same visit, render cleaning in Manchester and driveway cleaning in Manchester are usually cheaper combined.

Price and how often

Roof size and complexity, tile type, how heavy the growth is, and access. Access carries more weight in Manchester than it does anywhere else we work, because of the terraced streets and the parking.

Fixed price in writing before we start. Most city roofs want doing every four years, and every three if you are under trees. Send the address and photos from the ground for a same-day price.