When do you really need to clean your roof in France?

I am in two minds about cleaning roofs. Every now and then a man with a van and a ladder comes to our front door and asks if he can scrape and spray the gunk off my tiles to make them last longer. 

I always decline; partly because if it is a job that needs doing I could do it myself, and partly because I am not sure that every roof needs regular cleaning. 

If the roof is working properly, a few splotches of moss and lichen should not do any damage. That’s my opinion, but I admit it is a moot point. 

All roofs can do with an inspection visit from time to time to check for broken tiles and other problems, and valleys, gutters and downpipes do need attention to ensure water runs away as it should – which is the point of a roof.

Some roofs need more care

However, there are roofs that need more love and care than others. My friend has a north-facing roof that needs to be thoroughly cleaned annually because it has a shallow pitch and magnificently tall trees overhanging it. 

Beautiful though the trees are in full foliage, once the leaves fall they fill the channels of the roof that are supposed to conduct rainwater into the gutters. 

An incredible number of leaves and twigs creep into every little hole between the tiles that they can find, especially those behind the chimney stack. Wind and rain will only do so much to shift the debris to the ground.

Would I help him dislodge the worst of this rubbish? my friend asked. How could I refuse? We are on call for each other when two hands are not enough. 

The first question was access. A ladder is only useful for small jobs near the gutters but not for reaching debris near the ridge. So, we wheeled my ever-faithful modular scaffolding into place, with the platform positioned just below the height of the eaves and gutter.

Practical challenges

We climbed up to consider what we were going to do. We realised immediately that we had two options: either we would need to lay a roof ladder over the tiles and clamber about on them, or we would need longer tools. 

I have made my own roof ladder but this was not an occasion to use it. It is heavy and unwieldy, increases the risk of cracking a tile, and working on it requires the extra precautions of a harness and rope. 

Better, we thought, to do what we could from the gutter level. My friend got to work fashioning two very long wooden poles, one with two nails at the end and the other with a brush attached. 

These were weighty things and next time I would make them out of bamboo. However, they did enable us to reach all the way up the channels formed by the tiles and root out the material that was lodged there. 

We also needed an assortment of heavy-duty, short and long-handled brushes – the sort you get from a DIY shop, not from a home furnishings department. 

A surprisingly large amount of soggy leaves and twigs cascaded down and accumulated in the gutter at chest height. This was easy to scoop out and drop into buckets below. There is, I was surprised to learn, a dedicated gutter scooper available for purchase but it cannot be of that much use.

The only problem was a chimney just out of reach. The falling debris accumulated behind this and we had to perform gymnastics with our homemade tools to dislodge it.

We did not get every last piece of organic rubbish off that roof, but we did pretty well. At least we knew the water runways were now fairly clear. Trouble is, come next autumn, we will have to get the kit out and do it all again.