Mildenhall Roofers carries out flat and pitched commercial roofing work for businesses, farms and light industrial properties in and around Burwell.
Call any time. Calls are answered day and night and passed straight to our roofers.
Commercial roofing takes in a wider range of buildings than domestic work. Warehouses, agricultural barns, farm outbuildings, retail units, workshops and office blocks all have different roof types and different failure points. Flat roofs are the most common on commercial premises, but many agricultural and industrial buildings use shallow-pitched or profiled steel sheet roofs, and some older business premises carry traditional pitched slating or tiling.
Mildenhall Roofers works across all of these. We carry out repairs, overlay systems, full replacements and planned maintenance programmes, and work can be timed around business hours to keep disruption to a minimum.
Commercial roofs fail quietly. Because most staff and managers are not on the roof day to day, problems develop for months before anyone notices. Knowing what to look for - and understanding what causes it - lets you act before the damage spreads into the structure or contents below.
Flat roofs are designed with a slight fall - typically a minimum of 1:80 - so that rainwater drains away. When you see standing water that has not cleared within 48 hours of dry weather, the fall has been lost. This is usually caused by one of three things: the deck has deflected over time under load, the drainage outlets are blocked, or the roof was laid without adequate falls in the first place. Ponding accelerates membrane breakdown and adds dead weight that can stress the structure underneath.
Blisters form when moisture trapped beneath a felt or single-ply membrane heats up and tries to escape. On older torch-on felt roofs this is very common once the felt starts to lose its top surface granules and lets ultraviolet light degrade the bitumen beneath. Small blisters are a warning. Large or burst blisters mean the bond between membrane layers has broken down and water is already finding its way in. The fix depends on whether the insulation underneath has been saturated - a moisture survey will confirm this before any money is spent on the surface.
The most vulnerable points on any flat commercial roof are the edges - the upstands where the membrane turns up against a parapet wall, and the seams where sheets of membrane join. Bitumen and older felt become brittle with age, particularly after several freeze-thaw cycles in winter. Thermal movement - the daily expansion and contraction of the deck and membrane - works the joints open over years. A crack at a parapet upstand can let water run down behind the wall, damaging insulation, the internal ceiling and eventually the structural wall itself. This damage is often hidden and the leak appears well away from the actual entry point.
If a roof feels spongy when you walk on it, the insulation board or the timber deck beneath the membrane has absorbed water. Wet insulation loses most of its thermal value and adds weight. Wet timber rots. On older commercial flat roofs with a timber deck, rot can be extensive by the time you feel it through the membrane. A probe survey or thermal imaging survey will map the wet areas accurately and let a contractor strip and replace only the damaged sections rather than the whole roof.
Yellow or brown tide marks on a ceiling are often the first sign a commercial roof owner actually notices. But the stain is almost never directly below the entry point - water travels along purlins, joists and decking before it drops. Efflorescence (white salt deposits) on internal masonry walls near a flat roof parapet points to water moving through the wall from above. Both signs mean the ingress has been going on for some time.
On a commercial roof, a blocked outlet is more serious than on a domestic property. The roof area is larger, the volume of water is greater, and a blocked outlet can cause water to back up and pond across the whole surface within minutes during a heavy downpour. Box gutters built into the roof structure are particularly prone to this - they are difficult to inspect and debris accumulates unseen. Collapsed or leaking box gutters on farm buildings and industrial units are a common source of internal water damage that is mistaken for a membrane failure.
Profiled steel sheeting and fibre cement sheeting on barns and warehouses fail in different ways. Steel sheets corrode at the fixings first - the screws pull through or the washers fail, and sheets begin to lift at the edges. Fibre cement (Eternit-type) sheets become brittle with age and crack under foot traffic or from debris impact. Both types can also develop condensation problems on the underside when the lining or insulation has broken down. If you see rust streaking on the inside of a building or daylight through the roof, the fixing or the sheet itself has failed.
The cost of a commercial roof repair caught early is a fraction of the cost of the same job left. A small membrane split repaired promptly might cost a few hundred pounds. Left through a winter, the same defect saturates the insulation, rots sections of deck and stains the ceiling below - a job that now needs full strip and relay of a section, new insulation and internal redecoration. For agricultural buildings, a roof leak over stored grain, hay or machinery causes losses that far exceed the repair bill. Acting on the warning signs quickly is straightforward commercial logic.
As well as Burwell, we work on commercial, agricultural and industrial properties in the surrounding villages and towns. If your premises are in this part of Cambridgeshire or West Suffolk, call us to arrange a roof survey.
The right starting point for any commercial roof concern is a proper inspection - not a quote based on a description over the phone. A good survey will tell you whether you need a repair, a patch, an overlay or a full replacement, and it will identify any secondary damage the leak has caused. Ask any contractor you speak to whether they will provide a written scope of works before any price is agreed. That document should describe what is being done, what materials are being used and how drainage and edge details will be addressed.
Call Mildenhall Roofers to book a commercial roof survey for your Burwell premises. We will inspect the roof properly, explain what we find and give you a clear picture of your options before any decision is made.
No obligation · We'll call you to arrange a free visit
Call any time. Calls are answered day and night and passed straight to our roofers.
