Who We Are

One trade, done properly

Alpha Roofing repairs roof leaks. Not re-roofing, not replacement, not gutter installation — finding where water is getting into a building and stopping it there. Everything on this site is built around that one job, because it is a different job from covering a roof and it rewards being treated as one.

Why the narrow focus

Leak tracing is mostly elimination. There is a finite list of things that let water through a roof — flashings, valleys, penetrations, laps, upstands, drainage, the edge — and the work is ruling them out in the right order rather than backing a hunch. Done that way it is usually a small repair. Done the other way it is the same repair three times.

The most expensive mistake in this trade is sealing the spot where the ceiling is wet. Water runs along decking and framing before it drops, so on a pitched roof it entered somewhere uphill of the stain, and on a flat roof it could have come from anywhere. Seal the stain and the ceiling dries, the decking above it does not, and the problem comes back worse the following winter.

How a job runs

1. You describe it. Where the stain is, which floor, when it started, and what the weather was doing. That usually cuts the candidates to two or three before anyone arrives.
2. The roof is read from the stain upward. Following the path water took gives a search zone rather than a guess.
3. The entry point is confirmed, not assumed. Usually by wetting one detail at a time. A repair aimed at a confirmed cause is a different thing from one aimed at the likeliest-looking spot.
4. The cause is repaired and the deck is checked. Wet decking that gets closed up stays wet and fails again from underneath.

Built for the buildings here

Passaic is the seventh-densest municipality in New Jersey, on just 3.13 square miles, and most of its 21,513 housing units went up before the war. That produces a particular set of leaks: shared and near-shared roof lines, water draining into narrow gaps between buildings, parapets along the downtown blocks, and rear additions tied into main roofs at a shallower pitch. Almost everything starts at a junction between two things rather than in the middle of one.

The same pattern carries across the river into Garfield, Wallington and Rutherford, then loosens as the townships spread out. That is why the advice differs from page to page on this site rather than repeating one description of a roof.

When a repair is not the answer

Sometimes the honest finding is that the covering has reached the end of its life and a repair only defers the same conversation by a season. When that is the case we say so plainly, even though replacement is not what we do. Knowing which of the two you are looking at is worth more than a quick patch.