Asbestos Roof Encapsulation on a Distribution Warehouse near Brighton, East Sussex

What the Survey Found

Every project we take on starts with a proper survey, and this one was no different. We got up onto the roof, walked all of the elevations and recorded the condition sheet by sheet, so we knew exactly what the coating had to cope with before any of our painters arrived on the site. A survey like this takes the guesswork out of the job and lets us plan the work around what is actually there, not what we assume.

The main finding was heavy chalking across the whole roof, which is the old coating breaking down under years of weather and sunlight. That surface has to be washed back and stabilised or nothing new will bond to it. We also found cut edge deterioration along the sheet ends, and some corrosion staining bleeding out from the fixings where the washers had aged and let water track in.

The gutters had filled with moss and debris, and a handful of fixings had worked loose and needed resetting. None of it was unusual for a roof of this age, but all of it had to be dealt with before the new coating went on.

Structurally the roof was sound, which confirmed that encapsulation was the right call. There was nothing up there that justified tearing the roof off. The sheets held a coating well once they were prepared, and the defects we found were all on the surface and around the details, which are exactly the things a good coating system is designed to seal and protect across a large East Sussex roof.

Access was the other half of the survey. We planned to work from a mobile elevating work platform positioned around the building rather than loading the roof, which kept our teams safe and let deliveries carry on below. We phased the job elevation by elevation so the yard, the loading doors and the access roads stayed usable, and the warehouse near Brighton kept trading while our spray teams moved steadily around it. Working this way meant the tenant barely noticed we were there, which is how a coating job on a live site should be.

The Finished Distribution Warehouse

The change across the roof is the kind you can read from the ground. Where the sheets had been a faded, streaky, chalked pale blue, they now carry a deep, even coat with no patchiness and no dusty bloom. The grime lines have gone, the laps read as clean straight runs, and the whole distribution warehouse looks cared for again. It reads now as a proper, well kept commercial roof rather than a neglected one, and that first impression counts for a lot on a trading estate.

The colour is a rich Ocean Blue in a satin finish, spray applied for a smooth, consistent surface that a brush or roller could never achieve on a profiled roof. It sharpens the look of the building and gives the managing agent a roof that presents well to tenants and visitors, while the asbestos cement underneath is sealed and protected for the long term. The even satin sheen also helps the roof shed dirt and water rather than hold it, so it should keep looking clean for a good while.

Just as important as the look is what the client actually gets out of it. The surface of the asbestos is locked down, the cut edges and fixings are treated, and the roof is set up to shed water and stand up to the weather rather than keep breaking down. It is the same result we delivered on another recent project, where coating an existing roof gave a far better return than ripping it off and replacing it.

For a working site in East Sussex, that combination of a smart repaint and genuine protection is exactly what roof coating is for. The building keeps trading right through, the roof stops deteriorating, and there is no licensed strip out and no long shutdown to work around. The managing agent ends up with a roof that looks the part and does its job.

Standards behind our asbestos roof encapsulation work

Asbestos cement sheeting is safest left where it is and sealed, rather than broken out and carted off site. Our teams plan every job around the HSE's guidance on working with asbestos, and we hold CHAS accreditation so the health and safety paperwork a managing agent or farm business asks for is ready before the first van arrives.