Tile roofing

A tile roof isn't one system aging together. It's two, stacked, aging at completely different rates. The tile on top is basically inert. Concrete and clay don't rot, don't UV-degrade, and routinely outlive the people who installed them.

The felt underlayment underneath is doing the actual waterproofing, and it's a petroleum product baking on a deck that can hit 150°F+ in July. It dries out, cracks, and stops shedding water somewhere around the 20–25 year mark, long before the tile above it shows any sign of trouble.

Every tile roof we quote gets priced on which of those two clocks is actually running out, not on how the tile looks from the driveway.

The felt fails from below, out of sight, so the roof doesn't announce it. Water that gets past cracked underlayment doesn't drip straight down. It runs along the deck, follows a rafter or a batten, and shows up as a ceiling stain rooms away from where it actually got in. We've traced leaks fifteen feet from the entry point more than once.

That's why a tile roof passing a glance from the ground tells you almost nothing about the layer that's actually protecting the house. The only honest way to know where the felt stands is by its age, or by lifting a section of tile and looking at it directly, which is exactly what our inspection does.

Concrete and clay tile is strong in compression and brittle in a point load. Step on the flat field of a tile instead of over the batten line underneath it and it can crack. A hairline you won't see from the ground, but one that lets water straight through to the felt every time it rains.

Roofers know where to step. Solar installers, satellite techs, and AC crews going up to service a condenser usually don't, and a tile roof can pick up a season's worth of cracked tile from three unrelated service calls that had nothing to do with the roof itself. If you've had other trades on the roof and you're now seeing a new leak, that's the first thing we check.

If the tile itself is sound, no widespread cracking, no spalled concrete, nothing discontinued that we can't match. A re-felt is usually the right scope. We lift the tile in sections, strip and replace the underlayment, and relay the same tile back down. The tile is never hauled off, which is most of why it costs less than a full tear-off.

Full replacement is the right call when the tile itself has failed, cracked broadly, faded and spalling on concrete tile, or an old clay profile nobody makes anymore, or when the deck underneath the felt has rotted and needs to come up too. We tell you which scope you're actually looking at before you sign anything, and put the warranty terms on the underlayment work in writing either way.

Here's one of ours from the air, mid-job: the old underlayment off, the new going down, and the tile stacked on the roof ready to go back on.