Asbestos Garage Removal in Camberley

The whole aim with a corrugated cement roof is to keep it in one piece. Breaking or snapping the sheets is what puts fibres into the air, so each one is unbolted by hand and lifted down whole, kept damp as it goes, and wrapped before it ever leaves the roof line. There is no smashing, no power saw and no chasing dust around the drive afterwards. The fixings are eased out rather than cracked off, and any that have rusted solid are cut clear so the sheet still comes away in one panel.

A single garage in Camberley is a few hours of work. Strip the roof, lower the sheets one by one, wrap and load them, and you are looking at three to four hours start to finish for a straightforward one. A double garage, a longer run, or sheeting that has already gone brittle adds time, because each piece has to be brought down with more care. Because the sheets come off whole and go straight into wrapping, most garage jobs need no skip on the road, so the driveway and the street outside stay clear for you and the neighbours. That matters on the tighter terraced streets near the centre as much as on the wider postwar roads out on the heath. Graham, who owns Clearaway and runs the jobs himself, brings the team out from Chessington to the western edge of the county for exactly this kind of work, alongside the larger residential and commercial clearances.

The waste itself is double-wrapped, labelled and taken to a licensed disposal facility, not left bagged up by the bins or slipped into a household skip. Everything that came off the roof is accounted for and gone when the team leaves. By that point the frame below is swept down and ready for whatever you want to put back on top, whether that is the same day or once you have decided on the new covering.

Corrugated cement is bonded asbestos, which is lower risk than the soft, friable materials found indoors because the fibres are locked into a hard sheet. That does not mean it is handled casually. The same controls apply, the sheet stays whole, it is kept damp, and it is wrapped at height before it comes down. You cannot judge a sheet by sight alone, since a cement roof can look much like its asbestos-free cousin, so where there is any doubt a small piece is sampled and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory, with results back in a few working days before work is booked.

If a garage job ever tips into higher-risk licensed territory, the stricter rules apply in full, fourteen days of notice to the HSE, a sealed enclosure built around the work, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst before anyone goes back in. Most single-garage roofs do not reach that bar, but the standard is there when a job calls for it. Asbestos was only banned outright in the UK in 1999, which is why so much of Camberley's older garage and outbuilding stock still carries it today. Getting it off cleanly, by people who do this work every week, is the sensible move long before a tired roof starts shedding into the garden or the next-door drive.

Clearaway holds Spectra licence number 142305706 and has spent more than seven years working on roofs and outbuildings across this side of Surrey, from the Victorian and Edwardian villas near the centre out to the postwar estates spreading over the heath. For a look at your garage roof and a clear price for taking it down and putting a new one back, call 0800 024 6168.