Chatham gets 79 cm of snow. Stratford gets 218.

Roughly $8,250 to $19,000 for a full asphalt replacement in Ontario in 2026, with most houses landing somewhere in the middle. Area and pitch set the base. After that it is the junctions — every valley, dormer and chimney is flashing work, and flashing is the slow skilled part. A simple post-war roof in Sarnia and a Victorian in Stratford with five dormers are genuinely not the same job, and anyone quoting them at the same rate per square has not looked properly.

Because you get different weather, and by more than people expect. Environment Canada puts Chatham at about 79 cm of snow a year and Stratford at 218 — nearly three times — with the country inland of Goderich higher again. Up in the snowbelt the money goes into membrane, ventilation and the eave detail. Down on the Erie shore it goes into uplift rating and nailing pattern instead. Same trade, different problem.

Depends where you live and what you are doing. Swapping shingles like for like often does not need one. Touching the structure, the deck or changing material generally does. This is one of the few things that genuinely varies across the twelve municipalities we work in, so we check with yours before starting rather than guessing in either direction.

You can, and it is usually a false economy. It is cheaper on the day. It also adds weight in the half of this corridor that already carries the most snow, and it hides the deck — the one part of your roof nobody can assess without pulling the old layer off. Sound deck, low snow load, tight budget: defensible. In the snowbelt, rarely.

Photograph it. Then tarp it. Then call your insurer — in that order, and the order is the whole point. A roof made watertight before anyone documented it is a roof whose damage now has to be argued from memory. Photos from the ground, several angles, the debris on the lawn counts too. And please do not climb up to look; more people are hurt inspecting storm damage than by the storm.

Find where the heat is getting into your attic, because that is what causes them. Snow melts on the warm part of the roof, runs down to the cold overhang and freezes there. The usual culprits are recessed light fixtures, a bathroom fan ducted into the attic instead of outside, an attic hatch with no weatherstrip, and insulation stuffed into the soffits. Take the ice off without fixing that and you have bought exactly one thaw.

Depends on the deck and on how many things are wrong at once. One split plumbing stack boot on an otherwise sound roof is a cheap fix worth doing at any age, and it is the answer far more often than people expect. But a third leak since spring, with shingles curling and granules collecting in the eavestrough, is a roof being repaired past the point where repairing is the cheaper option. We would rather say so than sell you a fourth repair.

No, and you get the written findings either way — including the times the finding is that your roof is fine and the water is coming from somewhere else entirely. If a repair sorts it for a tenth of a replacement, that is what the report will say. Not much of a sales strategy, but it is the only version worth paying for.