The house on the Rawhiti Domain side of New Brighton had a leak nobody could find for eleven years. Water appeared on the hallway ceiling perhaps three times a winter, never in the same spot twice, never in a nor’wester, only in a slow easterly drizzle. I went into the roof space and found what
Post-Quake Roofs in Christchurch: Chimney Removals and the Patches That Followed Read More »
The Avonhead house had been repainted in autumn 2022, and by the following August the owner had a wet patch on the lounge ceiling and a firm belief that the paint had failed. I was asked to look because it was my product on the roof. The stain was 1.2 metres downhill of a brick
Flashing Failures Around Chimneys and Skylights Read More »
The call in June 2024 was about paint. A 1970s brick house in Chartwell, Hamilton, had its fascia and the bottom metre of rendered wall peeling a year after a repaint, and the painter wanted to know if my product had failed. It had not. I found the answer at the bottom of the downpipe
Where the Downpipe Ends: Roof Runoff and Soakage in Hamilton Read More »
In July 2024 I stood in a hallway in Kamo with a homeowner certain her roof leaked. There were three brown rings on the ceiling, one of them 400 mm across, and a bucket on the carpet. It had not rained for four days. The roof was dark grey Colorsteel, about fifteen years old, and
Northland Humidity and Roof Space Condensation: A Whangarei Case Read More »
My son’s first house is a 1990s two-storey plaster-and-tile place in Henderson, off Lincoln Road, with the internal spouting fashionable then: the gutter hidden behind the fascia so the roofline looks clean. In winter 2023 a brown stain appeared on the upstairs bedroom ceiling. He painted over it, and in March it came back bigger.
Internal Spouting and Overflow: A West Auckland Ceiling That Kept Getting Wet Read More »
In June 2024 I climbed onto a 1980s fibrous cement tile roof on Atkinson Road in Titirangi to look at a bedroom ceiling stain. The spouting at the back sat under a six-metre kauri overhang, invisible from the street. When I pulled the downpipe elbow off, half a litre of composted leaf matter fell out,
Bush Shade and Leaf Litter: Roofs Under the Waitākere Canopy Read More »
On 27 January 2023, the night Auckland Airport recorded more than 240 mm of rain in a day, a villa on Valley Road in Mount Eden put a stain the size of a dinner plate on a hallway ceiling. It had never leaked before. It stayed dry for six weeks of ordinary rain, then did
Finding a Leak That Only Shows in Auckland Downpours Read More »