"Jethro" <
krazy...@googlemail.com> wrote in message
news:QfVsq.15932$604....@newsfe05.ams2...
What a coincidence, during a downpour at 4am the other night I was woken up
by water pouring through the bedroom ceiling, or rather by my partner who
couldn't ignore the dripping sound any longer, not nice. We have the same
valley arrangement, in our case formed when an extension was added at 90
degrees to the original roof. It wasn't obvious at first what had happened
but after stripping back the tiles it turned out that the original battens
had been cut flush to the wood forming the base of the valley so some of
them were unsupported for up to 600mm and the heavy concrete tiles had made
them sag over the years so pulling the lead into a low spot.
Two of us spent about 4 hours fixing it, stripping the tiles off one side,
adding wood to support the battens, refitting and repacking with fresh
mortar. Ours is a house so access was 5m up a ladder, yours will be easier
I guess. Our tiles are simply clipped over the battens so removal is
trivial, other fixing methods may slow you down (place the cut tiles to one
side on the same row so you know which one came from where when you refit).
Strip form the top-down and refit from the bottom-up. Given that we were
fixing a design problem as well as repacking I reckon you could do both
sides of a valley in a day, easily, provided you don't hit any major snags
like broken tiles etc.
BTW you won't get a roof ladder into the valley area (if you think about it
the ladder length would need to vary as you moved up) so you'll be walking
on the tiles. For safety's sake we slung a line over the roof and tied it
off on the other side of the house. If you have a climbing harness you can
clip on at a length which would stop you going over the edge but even if you
don't it at least provides you with a hand hold.
Oh, and one more thing to consider, there's nowhere to put a cup of tea on a
roof.