Lyons Roofing

How to Get Something Off Your Roof Without Damaging It

You’re playing a fun game of Frisbee in the front yard when suddenly, uh-oh, someone has overthrown a pass and the disk has landed on your roof. To make matters worse, it’s now stuck, it’s well out of reach, and there’s no chance it’s coming down anytime soon. Obviously you don’t want to leave it up there, so what can you do to get it down?

Well, while you might be tempted to try the tested methods of throwing something else at it, using a long stick, or getting out the ladder and walking on the roof to go get it, the truth is that each of these methods could cause damage to your roof that could require expensive and time-consuming repairs. Obviously, nobody wants that, so the question then becomes how can you get your Frisbee, or any other object off your roof without causing serious damage?

Here are a few ideas you can try that can get the job done with little to no risk of roof damage.

Water Jet

Your roof is designed to withstand a barrage of water, which means using a hose with a nozzle on it could actually dislodge what’s stuck on your roof and allow it to roll off. The slope of your roof will help here, so this is a particularly ideal solution for things that somehow manage to stick on higher-slope areas of your roof.

This is also an ideal way to remove any debris that may have collected or accumulated in the valleys on your roof. Valleys are the areas where two planes intersect bowing inward, which is where water tends to flow toward and debris will usually stick to. This is vastly superior to using a broom

Lasso

Tie a rope into a lasso and try to use it to grab hold of whatever has gotten stuck on your roof. This happens to work particularly well with things like tree branches or palm fronds, which may have landed on your roof after heavy windstorms or other fluke occurrences. If this happens, it’s particularly important to get these things off your roof as soon as possible so they don’t accidentally cause even more damage by sinking or continuing to slide around on your roof.

Here are some tips for things you should not do to get something down.

Stick or Broom

You might be tempted to use a stick, like a broom handle or long tool, or even a broom itself to reach up onto your roof and drag whatever’s stuck up there off with you. While this will get down whatever is stuck, there’s risk in doing so. A broom dragging across the surface of your roof could cause tiles to become dislodged or even drag one out of place, which creates a gap where water could cause damage to the rest of your roof beneath. Furthermore, the impact from a stick or tool dragging across your roof could cause the tiles to crack or break, resulting in damage that will need to be repaired.

Throwing Something Else

Don’t have a ladder? You might be tempted to just throw something else at the object that’s stuck and hope it dislodges your Frisbee or other debris enough that it slides down and comes back to earth. Unfortunately, this also could crack roof tiles, requiring that they be replaced. If your aim isn’t dead-on accurate, you could even damage multiple areas of your roof around whatever is stuck on your roof, leading to even more damage spots that need repaired, without ever actually solving the problem of getting the thing down from your roof.

Walking On Your Roof

Why not just make things easy, get the ladder out, and walk up on your roof to grab whatever it is that’s stuck? Well, first and foremost, this is actually dangerous. Your roof is sloped pretty heavily, and this makes walking on it dangerous on its own. Plus, you may be anywhere from 10 to 20 feet or more off the ground when you attempt to do so. Falling from that height could cause devastating injuries.

However, assuming you’re able to keep your balance prevent yourself from falling, walking on your roof could have some serious negative consequences for your roof as a whole. Clay tiles are one of the most common roof materials in Arizona, and that means walking on them could cause them to crack, shatter, splinter, or come dislodged. All of these different things could result in damage to your roof that could cost thousands to repair.

If your roof has been damaged, contact Lyons Roofing at (520) 447-2522 today and let our Phoenix roofers fix the issues you’re having with your roof!

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