Drive down almost any street of 1950s to 1980s houses in St Agnes and you'll see the same thing: concrete interlocking tiles that have gone from warm red or brown to a blotchy grey, with moss along the north slope and lichen spreading across the ridge. The tiles themselves are usually fine. Concrete tiles are rated for sixty years or more and most of the roofs we coat in St Agnes, TR5 have plenty of life left. What has failed is the surface. After decades of Cornwall weather the top layer has gone porous, which is why it holds water, grows moss and looks tired.
A roof coating puts a new weatherproof skin back on those tiles. It seals the surface, restores the colour and makes the roof shed water the way it did when it was new. Done properly, with the cleaning and repairs that have to come first, it gives a St Agnes roof another ten to fifteen years of good looks for a fraction of the cost and disruption of stripping and re-tiling.
Why roofs in St Agnes fade and green over
Two things work against roofs in St Agnes. The first is moisture: Cornwall gets more rain than most of England and the air carries salt in from the coast, so a porous tile surface never fully dries out. The second is shade. North-facing slopes, roofs under trees, and the lower slopes of terraced streets in St Agnes spend half the year damp, and moss needs nothing more than that. Once moss takes hold it holds even more water against the tile, which speeds up the frost damage and spalling you see on older roofs across St Agnes, TR5.
Coating doesn't just hide this; it reverses the cause. A sealed tile surface doesn't hold water, so moss struggles to get a grip, and the biocide treatment we apply before coating kills the spores already in the surface.
What our roof coating service in St Agnes involves
Most of the roof-coating failures we get called to look at in St Agnes were sprayed straight onto a dirty roof by someone with a van and a pressure washer. Paint over moss and loose tiles and it will peel within two winters. Our process has five stages, and we don't skip any of them.
- Inspection. We get up and look at every slope before quoting. If the roof has widespread cracked tiles, failed underlay or rotten battens we'll tell you, because coating a roof that needs replacing is a waste of your money.
- Cleaning. Moss and lichen are scraped off by hand, then the whole roof is washed using soft-wash or controlled low-pressure methods. A jet wash at full power strips the surface off a concrete tile and drives water under the tiles into your loft, so we don't use one.
- Repairs. Cracked and slipped tiles are replaced, loose ridge tiles re-bedded or converted to a dry ridge system, and lead flashings around chimneys and abutments checked and dressed. Only a watertight roof gets coated.
- Biocide treatment. A fungicidal wash is applied to the clean, dry tiles and left to work. This is the step that stops the moss coming straight back under the new coating.
- Coating. Two spray-applied coats of a breathable, UV-stable acrylic roof coating in your choice of colour. We mask windows, walls and vehicles, sheet the garden, and work slope by slope so nothing is left half-finished overnight.
Colours and finishes
The standard range covers the colours you see on roofs across St Agnes: terracotta, rustic red, brown, anthracite, slate grey and charcoal. Most customers choose something close to the roof's original colour so the house still looks like it belongs on the street, but a change from faded red to anthracite is popular where the windows and doors have already gone grey. We'll bring colour samples to the quote and can show you photos of completed roofs in St Agnes, TR5 in each shade.
Is roof coating right for your roof?
Coating suits concrete and clay tile roofs that are structurally sound. That describes most of the post-war housing stock in St Agnes: the semis and bungalows of the 1950s and 60s, and the estate housing of the 70s and 80s. It is not suitable for everything, and we'll say so if your roof is one of the exceptions:
- Natural slate. The older terraces in St Agnes are mostly slate, and slate should never be painted. It doesn't need a coating, the paint peels off the smooth surface, and it looks wrong. A tired slate roof wants cleaning and a few slates replacing instead.
- Roofs at the end of their life. If more than one tile in ten is cracked, or the underlay has perished, the money is better spent on a roof replacement.
- Glazed or already-coated tiles in poor condition, where adhesion can't be guaranteed.
What a coated roof costs and what it saves
A roof coating in St Agnes is typically a quarter to a third of the price of a re-roof on the same house, and the job takes days rather than weeks. Because we repair before we coat, you also get the small defects fixed that would otherwise become leaks. We'll give you a written, itemised quote after inspecting the roof, with the cleaning, repairs and coating priced separately so you can see exactly what you're paying for.
Why homeowners in St Agnes choose St Agnes Roofing
We're roofers first. That matters with coating because the quality of the finish depends entirely on what happens before the spray gun comes out. Our team repairs, re-beds and flashes as part of the job rather than painting over problems, and we photograph every stage so you can see the repairs that went in under the paint. We cover St Agnes and the whole of St Agnes, TR5, and we'll give you honest advice even when that advice is "don't coat it, re-roof it".