Roof Plumber or Roofer? What's the Difference in Melbourne

I get asked this a lot: “Are you a roofer or a roof plumber?” Most people use the two words like they’re the same job. They’re not — and on a metal roof, the difference is the whole job.

Here’s the plain-English version.

What a roof plumber actually does

A roof plumber is licensed to handle everything that moves water on and off your roof. That’s not just the sheets. It’s the flashings, the gutters, the downpipes, the box gutters, the rainheads, the sumps and how it all discharges into your stormwater. In Victoria that work sits under the plumbing code (AS/NZS 3500.3) and you need a plumbing licence to do it properly and sign off on it.

In other words: the bit that actually stops water getting into your house is plumbing. A roof isn’t a hat sitting on top of a building — it’s a water-management system, and the leaks almost always happen at the joins, not in the middle of a sheet.

So what’s a “roofer”?

“Roofer” is a loose word. It can mean someone fully licensed like us, or it can mean someone who lays sheets and tiles but isn’t licensed to do the plumbing side. Plenty of good tradespeople call themselves roofers. The problem is when the flashing and gutter work — the parts that leak — get done by someone who isn’t across the code, or gets sub-contracted out and nobody owns the result.

Why it matters on a Melbourne metal roof

Think about where roofs actually fail: around the skylight, where two rooflines meet, in a rusted-out box gutter that overflows back into the ceiling during a big storm, at a flashing that was siliconed instead of folded. Every one of those is roof-plumbing work. Get a 6-metre stretch of Colorbond wrong and you’ll notice eventually. Get the box gutter or the overflow wrong and you’ll have water through your plaster the first heavy night.

Melbourne’s rain doesn’t come gently. Box gutters built before the current code often can’t cope with modern downpours — they were never sized for it. That’s a plumbing fix, not a patch.

How to check who you’re hiring

Easy one: ask for the plumbing licence number. A licensed roof plumber will rattle it off — ours is Victorian plumbing licence 108555. If someone gets cagey about it, that tells you what you need to know. You can also ask who does the flashing and gutter work: us, or a subbie? We don’t use subbies — same crew, start to finish, so there’s one mob responsible for the lot.

What we cover

Heasly & Son are licensed roof plumbers and metal-roof specialists. Across Melbourne we do metal re-roofs, gutter and downpipe replacement, box-gutter rebuilds, skylight installs and repairs, flashings and roof leak repairs — Colorbond and Lysaght, fully insured, 15 years on the tools. We don’t do tile or terracotta replacement (if that’s you, we’ll point you at Silverline).

If you’ve got a leak you can’t pin down, or a roof that’s due, get in touch and we’ll come and look at it properly.