What is this?
Okay, here we are on a huge long roof,
cedar shake roof, and it's full of this lichen and moss.
And we're just taking it off.
Now, because this is very slippery when it's wet,
and even when it's dry, we have to use all kinds of
safety gear on here. So, we're tied off with safety ropes.
You can see Roland there with his whole outfit on,
and we're using these chairs that,
they are called roof chairs, they sit on the roof.
You can use them to work from.
And basically we're cleaning it with various tools here.
What have we got here?
I'm using a little trowel, and that cleans out the area
between the shingles really good because it needs,
you need to get the pine needles and stuff out of there,
so the roof can dry out again.
And we're using a real stiff type yacht brush,
that scrubs off the lichen.
It comes off a little easier when it's wet.
But that's what makes it really treacherous.
Roland's up there using that yacht mop now,
and he's going to set a new record on that little piece.
Longest ever spent on two square feet of roof.
Anyway, we're getting it all done.
And the roof itself is not in bad shape.
If it can be preserved,
probably get another five or ten years out of it,
whereas if the moss would stay on it,
it would never dry out and it would rot immediately.
Within the next couple of years,
there would be nothing left of it.
So, it's sometimes worthwhile
spending a few bucks on cleaning your roof.
If it's too mushy, it can't be done,
but we caught this one in the nick of time.
So, here's the roof we just cleaned off here.
We put zinc strips up the caps,
and retailed those caps, and anyplace there was an
issue with the cap, I used a Tremco roofing caulking
here. It's Tremco 830 clear,
It's really sticky, and sold by the roofing store
so, it's for all kinds of roofing applications.
It sticks like crazy as long as your substrate is dry,
and here, we put on these extra strips of zinc,
down the corners, and sprayed off the stains a bit
We've scraped this all off, and it's almost gone back
nice new shake material, the colour of the unwhitened
cedar is kind of coming through on it.
So, probably those stains will come off in a couple
of weeks or a month.
And we've, what happens with the zinc,
is that water runs over it and kind of provides a
metallic atmosphere on the rest of the shingles
where it goes down, that the moss and the lichen
doesn't seem to like as much.
It's not the perfect answer, but it's the only one we had
at the moment, so that's what we're doing with it, and
you can see, we've done the upper floor here too.
Refastened the direction weathervane,
and set it to north, and we've got a bit more to do
and then we're done this job.
Okay.
So, here's that shake roof,
what we did after, we put, on the front, we put
one two three strips of zinc along the front there.
and on each tin courses,
put zincs under all the cap courses
And it's all cleaned off, and a little bit of heat on those
will take the stains off.
Gave it a little bit of spray to soften the stains
and allow the cedar to turn grey again.
Those are cedar shakes.
The reason that we went to such a great extent on them
was that they weren't all curled up, so there
should be quite a few years left in this.
It was a big slimy roof
but it's much better now.
Closed Captioning by Kris Brandhagen. brandhagen@gmail.com
