Asbestos Roof Removal in Guildford

Not every asbestos roof is a garage. A lot of the enquiries we get are for buildings that fall between a shed and an industrial unit: a workshop at the bottom of a yard, a flat-roofed extension, a stable block, a lean-to along the side of a house, a run of outbuildings behind a shop.

They have one thing in common. They are big enough that per-building pricing stops making sense and area pricing takes over.

How area pricing works

Asbestos cement removal is roughly £50 per square metre, indicative, once the roof is bigger than a single garage. Measure the roof area rather than the footprint, because a pitched roof has more material on it than the ground it covers.

Two costs sit outside that rate and should always be quoted separately.

Access. Scaffolding, a tower or a mobile platform, at £300 to £600 depending on what the building needs. A single-storey lean-to worked from a tower is at the bottom. A two-storey workshop gable needing a scaffold on three sides is at the top or beyond it.

Disposal. Charged by weight at £0.55 to £0.80 per kilogram. Cement sheet is heavy and a large roof is a real tonnage, so on bigger jobs disposal can be a larger line than the labour.

Anyone giving you a single rate per square metre with no access line and no disposal line has either buried both in the rate or is planning to add them later. Ask which.

The full set of ranges, including the interior materials and survey costs, is on the asbestos removal cost page.

Stripping in sections

Larger roofs come off in sections rather than all at once, and there are three reasons for it.

Weather, first. An open building is a wet building, and cement roofs are often over things that should not get rained on. Sections are opened and closed within the same working period wherever possible, and anything that has to stay open goes under temporary sheeting.

Use, second. A stable block, a workshop or a run of storage units can usually keep working at one end while the other is stripped. Nobody works under a section being removed, but that does not mean the whole building has to shut.

Structure, third. On some older buildings the sheets contribute more stiffness to a tired frame than anyone expects, and taking a whole roof off at once is not always the safe move. Section by section lets the frame be looked at as you go.

What tends to be different on bigger roofs

Roof lights. Corrugated translucent panels are let into most workshop and stable roofs. They are usually GRP, polycarbonate or wired glass rather than asbestos, so they are ordinary waste, but they are fragile and they are the most common fall-through hazard on a roof of this type. They should be on the quote as a separate line.

Condition. A garage roof is usually intact. A twenty-metre workshop roof that has been shedding fragments into the gutters since the 1990s often is not. That matters more than the size, because substantially damaged cement is notifiable non-licensed work and has to be reported to HSE before it starts. It is still work we carry out directly. It just needs the notification, a different method, and honest photographs at quoting stage.

Fixings. Older commercial roofs used hook bolts, crook bolts and sometimes drive screws through the crown, and a proportion will have seized. Cutting rather than forcing is slower and it is what keeps sheets whole.

Cladding. Plenty of these buildings have asbestos cement on the walls as well as the roof, which doubles the material and changes the access. That is asbestos cladding removal and it is usually quoted with the roof as one job.

Measuring it yourself

You can get close enough to a real price with a tape measure and five minutes, and it is worth doing before you ask anyone for a number.

For a pitched roof, measure the length of the building along the ridge, then the slope length from ridge to eaves on one side. Multiply those together and double it for both slopes. Do not use the width on the ground, because the slope is always longer than the span it covers and on a shallow pitch the difference is still ten per cent or more.

For a mono-pitch or a lean-to, it is simply the length times the slope length, once.

Then count the roof lights, because those come off the asbestos area and go onto a separate line. And note the height to the eaves, because that is what decides whether the job needs a tower, a scaffold or neither.

An approximate figure is fine. Nobody is holding you to the tape. What it does is turn a conversation about whether a roof is big or small into a conversation about a number, and it means the range you get back is narrow rather than the width of a barn door.

What the building is used for changes the job

Storage is the simplest case. Everything can be moved or covered, and the roof comes off in whatever sequence suits the weather.

A working workshop is more constrained. Machinery that cannot be moved has to be sheeted and protected, and the phasing works around which end you need. This is normally straightforward and it is normally cheaper than shutting for the duration.

Stables and animal housing need the most planning. Livestock cannot be under or immediately beside a roof being stripped, feed and bedding have to be covered or moved, and the timing usually has to work around turnout. None of that is difficult, and all of it goes wrong if nobody mentions it until the morning.

Anything attached to a house is different again, because the working area is next to living space and the dust control has to account for open windows and a garden that children use.

Farm and equestrian buildings

Stables, field shelters and small barns around Guildford, out towards Shere, Albury, Wonersh and Normandy, are full of cement sheet. Agricultural buildings tend to be larger, more weathered and harder to get a lorry to, and they have their own considerations around livestock and access tracks. Those are covered on the agricultural asbestos removal page.

Around Guildford

The buildings in this category cluster in two places.

Behind the older commercial streets and on the industrial estates, Slyfield in particular, where 1960s and 1970s light industrial units used cement sheet as standard for both roofs and walls. Those are straightforward for access and often large enough that disposal dominates the price.

And on the edges of the town and the villages beyond it, where a workshop, a stable or a long outbuilding sits at the end of a track that a lorry cannot reach. Same roof, considerably more handling.

We cover Guildford and the towns around it. The areas we cover page has each one, including how we get there and what the local waste rules are.