The first ten minutes
- OneMove what is under it Furniture, rugs, electronics, anything paper. Water that is dripping in one place at nine o'clock is frequently dripping in three by midnight, so clear a wider area than the drip currently needs.
- TwoCatch it, and give it somewhere to go A bucket, and a towel in the bottom of the bucket to stop the noise and the splash. If it is running down a wall rather than dripping, a towel at the base is doing more good than a container.
- ThreeKill the power to that area if water is near a fitting Water tracks along wiring. If it is emerging at or near a light fitting, a ceiling fan or a socket, turn that circuit off at the panel and leave it off. Do not stand in the wet and operate the switch.
- FourPhotograph it now, before it dries A wet stain is evidence. A dry stain is a mark on a ceiling. See below for what is worth capturing.
The bulging ceiling
If a section of ceiling is sagging or bulging, it is holding water, and the amount can be surprising. Left alone it will let go all at once, usually across a wide area. The conventional advice is to put a container underneath and deliberately make a small hole at the lowest point of the bulge with a screwdriver, standing to one side, so the water drains in a controlled way through one hole rather than bringing the whole panel down. It feels wrong to damage your own ceiling on purpose. It is almost always the smaller repair. If you are not confident, keep everyone out of the room and call.
What to photograph, and why each one helps
- The wet stain, in daylight
- Its shape and its edge tell a roofer something about whether water is arriving at a point or over an area. A dried stain loses the edge.
- A wide shot of the room
- So the position of the stain relative to the outside wall and the corners can be established. That geometry is the starting point of the whole search.
- Anything above it, from outside
- From the ground, from the garden, from across the street. A phone photograph of the roof slope above the stain is genuinely useful, and a zoom from the ground is safe in a way that a ladder is not.
- The attic, if you can get in safely
- Photograph the underside of the deck near the stain, with a torch, and photograph any wet or discoloured insulation. Do not walk on the ceiling between the joists.
- The gutter and the ground below it
- An overflowing gutter, a downspout discharging against the wall, or a pile of granules at the bottom of a downspout are all relevant and all photographable from a standing position.
Write down the weather
This is the part homeowners skip and it is worth more than most of the photographs. Note what the weather was doing when the water appeared, and what it had been doing for the hours before. Specifically:
- Wind direction. A leak that only appears with rain from one direction is a detail problem on that side of the house, and the direction narrows the search immediately.
- Duration against intensity. Water that only appears after several hours of steady rain behaves differently from water that appears within minutes of a downpour. The first suggests saturation and slow travel, the second suggests volume overwhelming something.
- Whether it was raining at all. A stain that appears during a winter thaw with no rain is ice, or condensation, not a hole. See ice dams.
- Snow on the roof. Note whether there was, and whether it was melting unevenly, which is visible from the street and is a strong sign of heat loss.
- Whether it had rained for weeks before without a drip. Sudden onset after a long wet spell often means something has finally saturated rather than something newly broken.
Most useful sentence a homeowner can say
It only does it when the rain comes from the south, and only in a long one.
Two things not to do
Do not go on the roof. A roof with a leak has wet decking somewhere on it, and a wet or rotten deck under a shingle gives no warning before it goes. Add a ladder, a slope and rain and it is one of the more reliable ways to be seriously injured at home.
Do not let anyone who knocked on your door go up either. After every hail event this metro fills up with people going street to street. A roofer who found you by knocking, wants to get on the roof immediately, and produces a contract to sign while standing on your porch is running a process designed to end in a signature before you have compared anything. You are allowed to say you will call somebody yourself.
What happens when you do call
You will be asked where the water is showing, which room and which wall, how high, when it started, and what the weather was doing. Those answers are not small talk, they are the first half of the diagnosis, and they are why this page exists. Then somebody comes out, gets into the attic if there is access, gets onto the slope above the stain, and works the search in the order set out on how a leak is traced.