Checking your roof and chimney before the heating season starts

What you can check from the ground and from a window

Walk around the house on a dry day and look up at the roofline against the sky. You are looking for tiles or slates that sit at a different angle to their neighbours, gaps where something has slipped, and any sagging along the ridge line that was not there last year. Binoculars make this much easier than squinting.

Check the gutters and downpipes while you are down there. A gutter sagging away from its brackets, or one packed with moss and leaves so that water overflows down the wall, is common on both older wooden houses and newer builds and is easy to miss from a distance.

From an upstairs window, if you have one facing the roof, look at the flashing around the chimney stack and any roof windows. Flashing that has lifted, cracked, or gone grey and brittle is one of the more common sources of a slow leak that only shows up once the frost sets in.

What to check from the loft

Go up on a dry day, ideally after it has rained recently, and bring a torch. Look at the underside of the roof and the rafters for damp staining, dark patches, or timber that feels soft when pressed with a thumb. Staining directly below a chimney stack often points to flashing rather than the chimney itself.

Check insulation for compression, gaps, or a musty smell, and look at where the chimney passes through the loft floor and roof structure. There should be a visible gap between the chimney and any combustible material such as timber or insulation; if insulation has been pushed right up against the flue, that is worth having looked at properly rather than left as it is.

Daylight showing through the roof deck, cobwebs thick with dust around a particular spot, or a draught you can feel with a flat hand are all worth noting down, even if nothing looks urgent yet.

Chimney signs to watch for in autumn

Autumn is when chimneys get used for the first time after months idle, so it is the right moment to look at the stack itself. Check the brickwork or render for cracks, crumbling mortar, or a white powdery residue, which usually means moisture is getting into the masonry.

Look at the chimney cap or cowl if there is one, and check it has not come loose or filled with a bird's nest over the summer, which is a genuine fire risk once the flue heats up. A stained patch on the roof or wall close to the chimney, or soot marks around the stack, both suggest something needs attention before you light a fire.

When to call a chimney sweep and when to call a roofer

A chimney sweep should be your first call before the season's first fire if the chimney has not been swept in the past year, if you noticed soot staining or smoke smell indoors last winter, or if you are moving into a house and do not know its history. A sweep will also flag structural problems in the flue that are not visible from the loft or ground.

A roofer is the right call for anything structural: a sagging ridge, slipped or broken tiles you cannot reach safely, damaged flashing, or daylight through the roof deck. Do not go up onto a pitched roof yourself to fix tiles unless you are confident and properly equipped; a fall from a roof is a serious injury, not an inconvenience.

For smaller, ground-level or loft-accessible jobs, such as clearing gutters, resealing a section of loose flashing you can reach, or checking and tightening a loft hatch, this is the kind of odd job we take on from 39 € per hour, minimum one hour. For an apartment building or office roof and gutter check ahead of winter, our building maintenance service, from 49 € per hour, covers the same ground on a larger scale.

• Chimney unswept in the past 12 months, or unknown history
• Soot smell or staining indoors after last winter's use
• Cracked, crumbling, or powdery chimney masonry
• Loose or missing chimney cap, or signs of nesting
• Slipped, cracked, or misaligned roof tiles or slates
• Sagging ridge line or visible dip in the roof
• Daylight or damp staining visible from inside the loft

Why this is better done now than during the heating season

Once the heating is running and the weather has turned, both roofers and chimney sweeps are busier, and a fault that could have waited a week in September becomes urgent in November when the temperature drops overnight. Booking ahead also gives you a free run of dry days to work with, rather than waiting for a gap in the rain in late autumn.

A chimney fault found in use, such as smoke backing up into a room, usually means going without that heat source until it is fixed, which is a worse position to be in than catching the same issue during a dry autumn afternoon. The same logic applies to a leak: a stain in the loft in September is a repair, the same stain in January after weeks of freeze and thaw can be a much larger job.