Roof Leak in Elanora Heights Traced to an Old Pool Solar Installation

The situation

A client in Elanora Heights had been living with a roof leak for a while. It had gotten bad enough that it was showing up downstairs, causing water damage and bubbling to the Gyprock ceiling. That kind of damage doesn’t happen from a quick drip, it’s a sign water has been getting in for some time.

What we found

The first thing we noticed once we got up into the roof space was that there was no sarking at all under the tiles. Sarking is the layer that sits underneath roof tiles as a backup: if any water gets past the tiles themselves, sarking is there to catch it and direct it away instead of letting it drop straight into the ceiling. Without it, there’s nothing standing between a wet tile and the ceiling below.

But missing sarking wasn’t the reason the roof was leaking in the first place, a roof shouldn’t leak even without it. So we went up on the roof itself to find the real cause, and found an old solar heating installation that had once been used to heat the pool. It wasn’t in use anymore, but it was still sitting on the roof, and that’s exactly where the leak was coming from.

What was happening is straightforward once you see it: water running down the roof was hitting the solar matting and being restricted, and that flow had nowhere to go. When water backs up like that instead of running freely off the roof, it can push back up under the tiles and in through the roof, rather than staying on top of them where it belongs. That backing-up was the entire cause of this leak.

The fix

We removed the old, unused pool solar installation from the roof and repaired the tiles underneath it that had been damaged from sitting under the matting. With the obstruction gone, water can now run straight down the roof the way it’s meant to, instead of banking up and finding its way through the tiles.

While we were up there, we went over the rest of the roof’s general condition as well. We sealed up every crack we found, replaced a couple of tiles that were broken, and repointed a small section to keep that part of the roof properly sealed.

The outcome

The leak that had been damaging the client’s ceiling is now fixed at the source, not just patched over the symptom. The roof no longer has anything sitting on it restricting water flow, and the general once-over means there aren’t other weak points waiting to cause the same problem again.

Got a ceiling stain or a leak that keeps coming back no matter what’s patched? Our roof leak repairs team traces leaks to their real source, whether that’s damaged tiles, failed flashing, or something sitting on the roof that shouldn’t be, rather than just resealing where the water happens to be showing.