PROJECT

Fixing a Leaking Commercial Flat Roof at Westwood Cross

A persistent leak around ductwork on a commercial flat roof, fixed with a Lloyd's approved fibreglass system before a restaurant's opening deadline.

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At-a-glance

Location: Westwood Cross, Thanet, Kent

Property Type: Restaurant — commercial flat roof

Service: Flat roof repair around pipe penetrations

Year: 2025

Duration:

Materials: Lloyd's approved fibreglass roofing system, UV-resistant topcoat

The brief

Captain D's — a Tennessee chain launching its first UK site at Westwood Cross — had a persistent leak on the commercial flat roof, around the points where the ventilation pipework penetrated the covering.

Pipe penetrations are the classic weak point on any flat roof. Every one of them is a hole cut through the waterproof layer, and each has to be sealed individually and permanently. When there are several of them clustered around plant, you have several separate opportunities for water to get in.

The leak had been patched before. It hadn't held, and water was still getting into the building.

The challenge

Previous repairs had made it worse, not better. Failed sealant and loose coverings had built up around the penetrations. Adding another layer on top of that would have been a fourth patch on a detail that had already failed three times. It all had to come off first.

The plant was already installed. The ductwork was in place and going nowhere, so everything had to be worked around it and wrapped up to it — rather than the far easier job of sealing a clear roof and then installing the equipment.

There was a hard deadline. The restaurant had an opening date. A leak on the day you open a new site is not a maintenance problem, it's a commercial one, and there was no version of this where we came back in a fortnight.

Multiple penetration points. Each one needed the same detailed treatment. Getting four out of five right just means you still have a leaking roof.

What we did

Cleaned and prepped the raised base around the ductwork so we were bonding to a sound surface rather than to old failed material.
Stripped out the failed sealant and loose coverings from the previous repair attempts. This is the step that gets skipped, and it's the reason patches keep failing.
Applied a Lloyd's approved fibreglass system across the surface — a seamless covering rather than a patch over a joint.
Fully wrapped the pipework bases, taking the fibreglass up and around each penetration so there is no joint at the point where water would find one.
Finished with a UV-resistant topcoat to protect the laminate from sunlight and give a hard-wearing surface.

The result

Clean, seamless and watertight. Every penetration point is securely sealed, and the restaurant opened on schedule with a roof ready for whatever the UK throws at it.

Worth saying plainly: this was never really a difficult repair. It was a repair that had been attempted the wrong way several times. Stripping back to something sound and laying a continuous fibreglass skin — rather than sealing over the top and hoping — is the whole difference between a fix that holds and one that gets you called back in six months.