Flat Roof Waterproofing Cape Town

Condition decides it far more than size. Stripping a failed system, correcting falls so the water reaches the outlets, and detailing the parapets, upstands and penetrations are the expensive parts, and the open slab is the cheap part. Access is the local variable: getting material onto a City Bowl or Atlantic Seaboard roof is often the biggest line on the quote. The inspection is free and it is what turns this into a real number.

Because our rain is driven rather than falling, and driven rain gets up and behind vertical details that vertical rain never reaches. It is almost always an upstand that was taken too low, a coping that sheds water back towards the wall, or a threshold detail at a door onto the roof. It is also why a roof can be watertight in ordinary rain for years and leak in every single front.

Very often yes, and it usually points at the parapet rather than the slab. That exact pattern gets diagnosed as wall damp and treated from inside the room, repeatedly, by people who never go up onto the roof. Checking the coping and the slab to parapet junction is part of every flat roof inspection we do, and it costs nothing to look.

It matters more here than it would somewhere with rain spread through the year, not less. Because seventy percent of our rain falls in four months, a ponding roof is not tested occasionally, it is tested continuously from June to September and then left alone to look fine all summer. Tell us upfront if your roof ponds. It changes the approach, because the falls or the outlets have to be corrected as part of the work rather than covered over.

We understand the logic and we would still say no. Winter is when a proper flat roof job is hardest to do, because most systems need a dry substrate and a dry window to cure. What we do in June is triage: stop the water, keep the ceiling up, and get you through. What we would rather do is inspect now and carry out the real work between October and April when it can be done once and done properly.