A dirty roof bounds to induce serious problems for your house like molds, leaks, and corrosion. To prevent that, you must maintain your roof in its good condition to ensure the long lasting and reliable roofing over your living spaces. In maintaining a roof, you need to check it regularly in every seasons change (for around 3 or 4 times a year) for missing or broken tiles, excessivedirt, clogged gutter, corrosion, molds, and stains. As for molds and stain, they need special treatment to remove. Here are 5 simple steps in clearing molds and stain out of your roof.
- In clearing them out, you will need a mixture of one part of water and one part of bleach or sodium percarbonate. Or you can use a 50:50 mix of water and 12.5% sodium hypochlorite (pool chlorine) as the solution as recommended by The Asphalt Roofing Manufacturers Association (ARMA).
- With a moderate power flow, spray the solution all over the roof. Be aware that this solution is harmful for plants. If you have plants around, make sure to spray them with clean water before you apply the solution to your roof. This will prevent the plants in absorbing the solution. After you have done in applying the solution into your roof, you need to spray the plants with clean water once again in case the solution stays on them.
- Let the solution does its work for a while (few hours).
- Spray clean water with a very slow pressure all over the tiles. Make sure that the water reaches all part and that you rinse the tiles thoroughly to get rid of the chemical. Never use strong pressure washing for tiled roof as it will cause damage on it.
- Let the tiles dry for a day or two.
Cleaning and Stain Prevention
To add an extra protection for your roof, you may likely consider applying addition protections onto it. The application of these extra protectors will act as further stain prevention. The first step is roof refurbishing and the second is adding metal strips.
- Roof refurbishing is spraying layers of liquid called coatings to the roof. First, you need to buff the deposit on the roof layer with a rag. Make sure that the tiles are free from dust and fully dried. Then, apply the primer or base coating and acrylic sealer thinly and evenly to all the exposed parts of the roof. The last step is repainting or applying the last coating to the roof with a mix of thick water and mildew proof acrylic paint.
- After the coating is fully dried, add zinc, galvanized sheet metal, or copper strips under the top row of tiles on both sides of the roof and let the edge of the strips exposed. The addition of the strips near the roofs peak may reduce the regrowth of algae and moss as the metal molecules are fatal for them.Often, copper strips are more expensive because they are more toxic for algae (more effective).