Roofing work starts again in March. The weather has settled enough for a roof to be opened up without risking the inside of the house, and every roofer we deal with has a diary that fills from about the second week onwards. Roof stripping waste is the densest load most domestic properties will ever produce, and it comes off far faster than people expect. Our Maghull skip hire service supports a lot of this work through the spring.
Slate and concrete tile are not the same job
The first question we ask is what is coming off, because the two common coverings behave completely differently.
Natural slate is thin and comparatively light for the area it covers. A slate roof produces a large number of pieces and a manageable tonnage. It also has a real second hand value, particularly the older Welsh slate found on the more established properties around here, and reclaimed slate in sound condition is wanted by people restoring older buildings.
Concrete tile is another matter entirely. The interlocking tiles that went on most post war housing are thick, dense and heavy, and a roof covered in them carries several times the weight of the same roof in slate. A lot of the housing in Maghull dates from exactly that period, so this is the more common job locally, and it is the one that catches people out on skip sizing.
If you have concrete tile coming off, assume the weight limit will be reached long before the skip looks full. Our page on skip size versus weight limits explains why volume and weight work as separate constraints.
Everything else that comes off with the covering
The covering is the bulk of the weight but not the whole load. Battens come off with it, and on an older roof those battens are often riddled with woodworm and sometimes rotten at the ends. There is usually old bitumen sarking felt, which tears into awkward strips and is not recoverable.
Then there is the debris that has accumulated in the roof void over decades. Old mortar from the ridge and the verges, nails by the thousand, and on many older properties a layer of dust and soot that has been sitting on the ceiling since the house was coal heated.
Lead flashing is worth pulling out and keeping separate. It has a value, it should not be buried in a skip full of tile, and any roofer worth using will already be setting it aside.
Where the skip has to sit when scaffold is up
This is the practical point that decides everything on a roofing job, and it is decided before the scaffold goes up rather than after.
Scaffold takes the perimeter of the house. That is precisely where you might otherwise have put a skip. If nobody has thought about it, the scaffolders finish on Monday and on Tuesday there is nowhere for a container to go that is both reachable by our lorry and reachable by whoever is throwing tiles into it.
Talk to the roofer and the scaffolder before the scaffold is erected. It costs nothing at that stage to leave a gap or to plan a chute position, and it is close to impossible to fix afterwards. What we need is a clear approach for the vehicle, room to work the arms, and overhead clearance, and scaffold poles and lift beams eat all three.
The other consideration is that a chute needs the skip directly underneath it. A skip twenty feet from the chute means every tile is handled twice, and on a full roof strip that is thousands of individual movements.
Sizing and exchanging
For most domestic roofs an 8 tonne builders skip is the working unit, and on a concrete tile strip you should expect to exchange it rather than fit the whole roof into one container.
Plan the exchanges with us rather than ringing when the skip is full and the roof is open. A roof that has been stripped and is sitting under a temporary covering is not a comfortable position to be in for two days waiting on a lorry. Our builders skip hire for construction and renovation waste page covers how these loads usually run.
Keep the load flat and even as it goes in. Tile tipped into one end of a skip makes the lift awkward and wastes the far half of the container.
Keeping the tile clean
Clean tile, slate and mortar are inert material and they crush down into something useful. Mixed with the felt, the timber battens and the general debris, the whole load becomes mixed waste and none of it gets recovered as cleanly.
On a roof job the separation is easier than on most others, because the materials come off in stages. The covering first, then the battens and felt. If the covering goes into one container and the timber and felt into another, or into bags at the side, you have done most of the work without any extra effort. Our environmental and recycling page explains what happens once the load reaches our site.
Permits and access
Maghull sits within Sefton borough, so a skip on the road needs a permit from Sefton Council at £36 per month. Our guide to skip permits in Southport covers the same authority and process.
On a roofing job the permit period needs to cover the whole programme rather than just the strip. Roofs overrun for weather reasons more than any other trade, and a permit that expires while the scaffold is still up is an avoidable irritation.
Local coverage
We run this area regularly, taking in Lydiate skip hire and Aintree skip hire jobs alongside Maghull, and our drivers are used to working around scaffold and around roofing programmes.
Ring us on 0151 909 6399 and tell us whether it is slate or concrete tile and roughly what area. That is all we need to size it and to plan the exchanges. Our contact page is there if the roofer would rather deal with us directly.
