We have built a lot of pitched roofs, as well as garden rooms within the city of Cardiff. This means that we install a lot of breathable membranes, so we thought, it would be a good idea to write a detailed article explaining the benefits of a breathable membrane being installed.

Why are breathable membranes used in pitched roofing?

So, if you were to take off some much older roofs, let’s say a roof on a house in Penarth, that has its original slate roof. If that roof is say over 100 years old, it won’t have a modern breathable membrane.

However, when roofing contractors are now laying a new roof onto a house, they need to install a breathable membrane. The purpose of this is to allow the roof, and the house to brief, it can help to prevent damp and mould forming within the building. It also serves different purposes such as helping to prevent insects from entering the roof as well.

An absolute piece of cake to install

So, you might think that installing a breathable membrane onto a roof, might be a time-consuming task?

However, experience roofing contractors, like our company, can lay a breathable membrane, and then put pressure treated battens on top, and we can normally complete this work in a matter of a few hours.

The reason why it is so easy to install a breathable membrane, onto a new roof, is simply because all of the old roof tiles will be removed.

Then it’s just a matter of rolling out a breathable membrane onto the roof, then we can use a nail gun the simply stable the pressure treated wooden batons into place. This part of the roof construction can be completed very quickly, what takes much longer is placing each roof tile into place and nailing that onto the batter.

So, do you need a breathable membrane added to every single roof?

Yes, regardless of whether the house is a terraced house, semi-detached or a detached house, you will need a breathable membrane added to the roof.

As earlier mentioned, the breathable membrane helps to keep more moisture outside of the building, yet also is breathable so it allows the roof to grieve and to air, therefore causing less mould and damp spores to occur within a roof.

We also build a lot of garden buildings, within the city of Cardiff, we have now built many garden offices, garden gyms and also garden bars.

When we are building these buildings, we add a breathable membrane onto the side walls as well. Therefore, the walls on these wooden buildings are built similar to a pitched roof, in that there are structural timbers, then there is the breathable membrane, and then nailed to that is wooden batten. Then on top of the wooden batten would be the exterior cladding, however we could use roof tiles on the side as well.

What happens to a roof that doesn’t have a breathable membrane?

More insects could enter through the roof, also it can make the attic more damp, for example damp spores are more likely to occur, and also the roof will be missing an extra layer that prevents water ingress.

The gap between the tiles overlapping, might be absolutely minimal, yet if there is not a breathable membrane underneath the damp air can still be drawn into the roof. So what a breathable membrane allows is for the roof to pre-also for some of the moisture to roll off the roof.

Do you need your roof replaced within the city of Cardiff?

What’s great about picking us, as your Cardiff roofing company, is that we can take care of every single detail of building your roof. We can hire skips for you, and place all the waste into the skips.

We can get all of the steel scaffolding built around your house, sometimes the scaffolding can be built to provide a temporary cover to the roof as well.

Then our highly experienced roofers, can get to work on building your new roof. They will take off the old roof tiles, and place them into a waste skip.

Then and they will and the breathable membrane, they will add the lead flashing around the chimney, they will then add the roof batten. Onto the roof batten they will add the roof tiles that you have selected, we can offer you so many different roof tile options. For example, would you like clay roof tiles added to your roof? Would you like fibre cement roof tiles added to your roof? Or would you like in our opinion, the best type of roof tile that money can buy, and that is brand-new Welsh slate roof tiles, this option will last a very long period of time.

So therefore, if you’re looking for a roofing contractor, why not call us?