Conservatory Cleaning in Stechford

Decades-old lean-tos greening in humid valley air

The typical job here is a lean-to or Victorian-style addition now twenty-five to thirty years old, with a polycarbonate roof that has been accumulating algae for a decade and seals that are well past their best. The local accelerant is humidity. The green swathes along the Cole sit at a distance from the houses, so overhanging trees are not the cause. Damp air and long shade do to a conservatory roof what a mature lime tree does to a roof beneath it, and the north-facing pitch is always the one that has gone. By that point the room has usually stopped being a room and become somewhere to keep the bikes and the freezer.

• Nineties and two-thousands rear additions on bought houses, now old enough that the seals are the weak point
• Polycarbonate roofs greening fast in humid valley air, with no overhanging trees needed
• The shaded pitch always ahead of the sunny one, so half the roof looks a decade older than the other half
• Moss coming off the main roof slope and landing in the shallow perimeter gutter, which fills before the house gutters do
• Rooms that quietly stopped being used and became storage once the light stopped coming through

Low pressure only, on seals that have seen decades of winters

Everything on the roof is a low-pressure soft wash, and that is a structural judgement. Decades of Birmingham winters have flexed the glazing bars on one of these additions and the seals are now the weakest thing attached to the house, so force is the surest way to create the leak the owner was worried about. A biocidal solution is laid across the panels, left long enough to kill the growth outright, then taken off with a pure water rinse. The shaded pitch usually wants a second application where the sunny one does not.

• Low-pressure soft wash only: solution laid on, given time to kill the growth, then rinsed away with pure water
• A second application on the shaded pitch, which in this valley is always further gone than the pitch that gets sun
• The perimeter gutter emptied and run through on the same visit, since moss off the main roof lands in it first
• Glazing bars, seals and the rendered wall the lean-to abuts all looked over and reported back to you

More detail on the equipment and the order of work: the full conservatory cleaning process.

Where the B33 conservatories actually are

The work sits on the bought semis with longer back gardens, mostly on the streets running down towards the green swathes, where there was room to build out and an owner willing to pay for it. A spring clean leaves the room bright for the summer months. A conservatory pairs well with the gutters or the windows on the same visit, and because B33 is covered on scheduled days it is worth booking ahead.

Roof material and years of green set the figure

Three things set the figure: floor size, whether the roof is glass or polycarbonate, and how many green years it has behind it. A first visit after a decade is a long job with two applications on the shaded pitch, and every annual visit afterwards is short. One limit belongs in the quote itself. Polycarbonate that has turned yellow has been broken down by ultraviolet light and is not carrying dirt at all, so nothing we do will touch it. The green lifts off entirely and the yellow stays put. On an older roof in Stechford you are usually looking at both together, and we separate the two at the quote.

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Yearly on the valley side, longer gaps up by the railway

Annually on the valley side of the ward, and the reason is humidity. Further up towards the railway and the main road, eighteen months to two years is usually fine. If a roof has been left untouched for years, expect the first visit to be a substantial job and every one after it to be short and inexpensive, which is the argument for getting onto a yearly cycle before it goes green again.