Roof cleaning and moss removal in Worthing

2.1 Hand scraping and brushing

Scrapers and stiff brushes lift moss in sheets without driving water into the roof. It is slower than washing, which is one reason it can cost more, and MyBuilder's roof cleaning guide puts manual scraping at £5 to £10 per m². It suits most tiled and slated roofs, and it lets whoever is on the roof see every tile as it comes clean, spotting the cracks that moss had hidden. Debris is bagged as it comes off rather than hosed into the gutters. Slower hand work also means the roof is handled tile by tile, which suits older coverings where one hard push can crack a tile or dislodge a slate. On a large roof the job runs across a long day, and that time is what the price pays for.

2.2 Soft washing, steam and pressure washing

Soft washing uses low-pressure water, often with a cleaning solution, to loosen lichen and algae so that it rinses off instead of being blasted away. Steam does a similar job with heat and suits some stubborn lichen. Pressure washing is the method people picture, and the one to be careful about. MyBuilder's guide warns that pressure washing can harm delicate tiles, and the reasons are easy to see: a hard jet strips the protective face from a concrete tile, chips old clay and can push water up under the laps into the underlay and the loft. Where a firm offers pressure washing, ask what pressure it uses on your covering and what it does about the gaps between the tiles. Our answer on pressure washing roof tiles goes further.

Soft washing needs care in its own way. The pressure is low, but the volume of water is not, and a roof with failed pointing, slipped slates or gaps in the underlay can take in more than it should. We look at the condition of the covering first, and where a roof is not sound enough for water at all, hand methods are the answer. Whatever the method, deeply rooted growth is taken off in stages rather than in one hard pass, so the face of the tile is left as intact as it can be.

4.1 When a scaffold is needed, and who licenses it

MyBuilder's scaffolding guide puts a standard two-storey house set-up at around £850 to £1,200, with a chimney scaffold at £400 to £900. Where the scaffold stands on or over the public highway, section 169 of the Highways Act 1980 requires a written licence from the highway authority, and it names the cleaning of a building alongside repair and maintenance. The scaffold firm applies for it. In Worthing and the rest of West Sussex that authority is the county council, which asks for at least 10 working days' notice, so a scaffolded clean is booked further ahead than one done from a ladder. Brighton and Hove, as its own highway authority, runs a separate licence.

4.2 Debris, run-off and neighbours

What comes off a roof has to go somewhere. Moss is bagged as it is lifted, gutters are cleared by hand into a bucket rather than flushed down the downpipe, and sheets or boards protect the borders, the greenhouse and the car on the drive. Biocide and wash water are kept away from ponds, vegetable beds and the neighbour's side. A word with the neighbours before the day lets them move cars and bring washing in. We look for overhead cables and service lines before a tower or ladder goes up. Both bats and nesting birds are protected and can be living under moss-covered eaves, so we look for them before any moss is lifted. A handful of moss from a hopper is bagged, not dropped onto the flowerbed below.

6.1 The yearly look

The most useful habit is a look each autumn and after any big gale. Gutters and downpipes are cleared before the leaves fall into them, valleys are checked for build-up, and the ridge line is looked at from the ground for tiles out of line. Branches that overhang the roof are cut back so that shade, leaves and seed stop landing on it. A phone photo from the same spot each year makes changes easy to see, and it costs nothing. If a slope greens over again within a season or two, that tells you something about the shade or the drainage above it, and it is worth mentioning when you call us. Gutter cleaning on its own is covered by our gutters, soffits and fascias page.

6.2 Faults the clean uncovers

Moss often hides what is wrong underneath. Once the tiles are clean we can see cracks, slipped slates, hairline splits and tired mortar. On older ridges the bedding mortar is the usual weak point: bedding mortar has not been trusted on its own to hold ridge and hip tiles since BS 5534 was revised in 2014, so they are mechanically fixed too. Fixing a ridge or a tile while the access is already in place saves putting it up twice. Where we find a fault we photograph it and quote the roof repair for you to decide on. A clean removes growth; it does not mend a cracked tile. Any repair we carry out is photographed before and after, so you can see what changed.