Roof manufacturer and installation contractor to avoid

We used Supra Trusses to build and supply trusses for an extension to our home and the experience with team was genuinely horrible. Firstly the trusses were delivered in the rain, left in pouring rain by their team for 3 days.

Their appointed roofing contractor came to erect the trusses and the first installation issues we identified where the "chases" (truss pockets) were not aligned. This then followed where our exposed beam trusses (as per design) was resting on a wooden wall plate that was erected on the inner side of the trusses, leaving no gap for the face-bricks to close the gap. The General Manager laughed at this blatant flaw and said we shouldn't tell him how to build roofs and that hundreds of roofs have this exposed wooden wall plate, even when it has exposed beams. We have seen many in our lifetime and never before have we seen this to be true (same was confirmed by roof inspector).

The Permanent Lateral Bracing installation led to newly installed CCTV camera wires being cut down and left for us to pay the security company again to come and re-install wiring. Again the General Manager just rolled his eyes on whatsapp and said it will make him swear at people.

The next issue was the tiles, a sub-standard non-approved SABS tile they sourced from Coverland which seems to be brittle and breaks easily on the corners. Again no recourse or any accountability, even from the owners, whose lack of action and wilful blindness surprised me for a business that long in the roofing industry.

Obviously the wet (read drenched) trusses gave us issues which the contractor managed to pull straight with the lateral bracing. However no diagonal bracing was installed as per their drawings and secondly these trusses never dried out properly and even though we only painted them 2 months later, they still caused yellow stains to show through the white paint, adding substantial cost to paint the trusses a number of times.

The roofing contractor that works for Supra Trusses (or not, depending on who you ask) is not even registered at the NHBRC or ITC-SA. This poor man complained bitterly about the poor treatment he receives from the General Manager at Supra Trusses, constant swearing and low labour rates being paid on work for him to perform.

We would not recommend using Supra Trusses for any roofing work and a similar bad experience was reported by an attorney we know.