Do You Have A Roof Leak? Check This Out

Check out how we got this roof leak sorted.

The Issue

We were at a job just on the coast of WA, so it gets a lot of storm fronts. The house is only about one and a half or two years old, but it’s having issues with a roof leak. Now, the owners are retiring and they want the house to be a lock and leave. But it can’t be a lock and leave when there’s a roof leak and the carpets are getting wet.

We’ve been here for a similar issue before but we have fixed it. It was the one upstairs. There was a joint that was missing a bit of silicon. We got called back again for another leak. It was coming through the light. And so the whole ceiling was getting wet. And as you can see in the video, it’s swollen now so the cupboard doors are getting caught and you can’t open it.

The original roof plumber has put some rain heads off the side of the gutter, so the gutter can’t fill up and pour over to the back. But the problem is it’s a parapet wall. So you can’t dump water on to other people’s places. It was a vacant block at the time, but now there’s a building that’s starting there.

We show you in the video when we were above the laundry room. Water was damaging and coming out of the light fitting. Before this, there was a little joint here that was leaking. It hadn’t been sealed. We washed all that down, but there was no leaks anywhere. Yet as soon as we put any water on this thing, especially on this groove joint, it started leaking, so we fixed all that up.

But now we found that when that massive storm front came through, the gutter is overflowing and the back of it is going straight into the laundry and wetting the cupboards and everything.

Original Solution

So what the original roof plumber had done was he put a couple of pops, which is just below the level of the back of the gutter and so it would flow out.

That means the water couldn’t get into the laundry area. But the thing is, he put them out to the property at the back. There was no house there then, but now there is. So we have to seal that off so it can’t go into this guy’s property.

There’s also another one that was off onto this guy’s alfresco area. At first, it had to be sealed off because whenever there was a massive storm front and a dump, it would just come up and overflow into the roof. But now it wouldn’t work because it would go off into this guy’s alfresco area.

Our Solution

So what we did was we put another pop at the other side of the rain head where this whole gutter goes into. So if that ever gets too full, it will flood out that way as you can see in the video.

It doesn’t seem like much roof, so you’d think the gutter should be able to handle it, but we’ll show you in the video. There was another roof above it, which is about 12 meters wide. That whole roof goes into a down pipe onto that small bit of roof. And then there’s another roof above on the other side, which was the same deal. So that whole section is going on to this tiny little gutter down there. That’s why it’s overflowing all the time.

So what they should have done when they built it is to put some hundred mil internal downpipes, come all the way down and pipe it away individually. But they didn’t do that, so now the only option we’ve got is not beautiful, is not pretty, but we just have to get those downpipes and run another hundred mil sewer pipe, which is a bit stronger, across the top of this roof, bypassing this gutter, completely stick it straight into the rain head down here. And that means that roof and this roof will all just go directly into this as you can see in the video. Then all the pressure will be on the lower gutter down here. And if that overflows, that doesn’t matter too much because it’s just a courtyard there.

The End Result

We’ve hooked into both downpipes for the roofs above. We’ve kept it off the roof, so water could still flow underneath this pipe that we’ve got in. We all just clipped it off, bolted it to the roof, siliconed them down. This goes all the way over and then pops in straight down into that rain head now. So that means any water now that comes from all these above roofs bypasses this small bit of gutter goes straight into the rain head. Hopefully it won’t be pouring over the back anymore into the laundry because it’s only a small section of roof and that gutter can easily handle it. But we’ll just wait for the next massive front to come through and see. We do think that we’ve solved it on this one.

If you need help with roof leak or something like this, call us. We’ll be happy to help.