Cherry Hill Roofing has handled roofing in Haddon for more than 20 years, and on most jobs here the conversation does not stop at the shingles. We look at the whole path water takes off a house: the roof surface, the flashing, the gutters, the leaders and the spot where each downspout lets go. A roof that sheds water well and then drops it beside a foundation has only done half its job.
Every visit starts with a straight answer. If a roof can be repaired, we say so before replacement is ever raised, and when a leak is the reason for the call, someone goes into the attic as well as onto the roof. The water gets traced to where it actually comes in before anything is priced, because guessing from a ceiling stain is how people pay for the wrong fix.
When replacement does make sense, our written scope breaks out tear-off, decking, underlayment, flashing, ventilation and gutters as separate lines. You can set it beside another contractor’s estimate and compare line by line, including the gutter and downspout work that most of this page is about.
Stormwater in Haddon Township’s Master Plan
Why the Township Put Water First
Haddon Township’s 2019 master plan update called local stormwater management “the most significant and overriding issue” identified in the whole process. That is unusually strong language for a planning document, which normally spreads its attention across zoning, housing and traffic. When NJ Pen reported the update in December 2019, stormwater sat at the top of it.
The township planner, Linhart, named part of the cause directly: some of the flooding “is the result of the water being redirected from houses, from roofs, driveways, concrete.” Roofs are on that list by name. For a roofing contractor, that one sentence changes how a gutter job should be read.
What We Take From It, and What We Don’t
We do not read the plan as a reason to alarm anyone. Nobody has measured what a single house adds to a creek, and we will not pretend to know. The planner’s point is about water from many roofs, driveways and patios adding up, and the part any one homeowner controls starts at the eaves.
We also have not read a township ordinance on how roof leaders or downspouts must discharge, so we never tell a customer a particular setup is mandatory. Our part is making sure the water your roof collects goes somewhere sensible.
Looking for roofing closer to Collingswood? See Collingswood Roofing.
Where Your Roof’s Water Goes
Gutter Sizing and Runoff
A roof is a collection surface. Every square foot of it turns rainfall into concentrated flow that lands in a gutter, runs to a corner and drops down a leader. A large roof plane, a steep pitch or a long valley feeding one run of gutter all push more water into a small space, and an undersized gutter overflows exactly where you least want it to.
When we size gutters, we look at the roof area draining to each run, where valleys concentrate the flow, and how many downspouts that run actually has. On many houses the fix is not a bigger gutter but one more leader, so a single corner is not carrying the water from half the roof.
The Downspout Is the Last Inch of the Roof
Where a downspout ends decides where the roof’s water goes next. A leader that stops at a splash block beside the foundation, one that empties onto a driveway sloped toward the street, and one that drains toward a neighbor’s yard all send the same rain in different directions. Plenty of homeowners have never looked at where theirs let go, because the leaders were there when they bought the house.
On a roof or gutter job we walk each downspout to its outlet and note what we find. If an extension, a turned elbow or a relocated leader would move water away from the foundation and onto ground that can take it, we price that as its own line. You decide whether it is worth doing.
Gutters on the Scope, Not as an Afterthought
Seamless aluminum gutters and leaders are what we install most, and they get their own line on the estimate rather than a vague allowance. Drip edge at the eaves is set so water leaving the shingles lands in the trough instead of running behind it. Kick-out flashing goes where a roof edge meets a sidewall, one of the most common places for water to sheet down siding instead of reaching a gutter.
At the end of each work day the gutters are cleaned out along with the yard and driveway, including a magnet sweep for roofing nails. A gutter packed with granules and scraps on the first rain after a job is a gutter that overflows, and that defeats the point of planning the drainage.
Westmont Houses, Flashing and Decking
What the Housing Stock Looks Like
Downtown Haddon Township is known as Westmont, and Crystal Lake, Cuthbert and Oakdale are other place names within the township. The township was incorporated in 1865 from part of Newton Township. The American Community Survey’s 2024 five-year estimates count 7,407 housing units here, of which 2,794 were built between 1940 and 1959 and 1,850 date to 1939 or earlier.
Of those units, 4,689 are detached houses. On a house that has been reroofed more than once, gutters and leaders are often replaced piecemeal, and their outlets can end up wherever a previous installer happened to put them. We check each one rather than assume the layout was ever planned as a whole.
Flashing That Keeps Water on the Path
Water that gets past flashing never reaches the gutter at all. When we redo a roof, flashing at chimneys, sidewalls, skylights and the joints where two roofs meet is replaced, not caulked over. Step flashing with counter flashing set into a reglet holds far longer than a bead of sealant that dries out and cracks.
A chimney cricket on the uphill side of a wide chimney splits the flow so it does not pond against the masonry. These details are small on an invoice, but they decide how much water stays on its way to the gutter instead of finding a path into a wall.
Decking Under the Old Roof
Under a roof that has leaked at the eaves for a while, the decking is often where the damage shows. When the old roof comes off and we find soft or rotted sheets, we photograph them and show you before anything is replaced, at a per-sheet price already written into the contract. You see the damage yourself, and you know the cost before the crew moves on.
Shingle color gets the same hands-on approach. We hold samples up on site against the brick, stone or siding of your actual house, because a color that looks right in a brochure can look wrong beside your trim.
Floodplains, Infill Lots and Coverage
Cooper River and Newton Creek
The master plan update places substantial portions of Haddon Township along the Cooper River, Newton Creek and their tributaries within 100-year floodplains. The planner also said there are houses that “shouldn’t have been built in a floodplain.” That is a statement about the township as a whole, not about any particular street or address.
We have not run a flood-zone lookup for any property, and we will not guess whether yours is mapped. What we can say is that in a township whose own plan ranks stormwater first, sending roof water away from the foundation is a reasonable thing to raise on any job, near the creek corridors or not.
Infill Lots With Little Room
NJ Pen’s reporting noted that much new single-family construction in the township comes from minor subdivisions and infill on scattered vacant lots between existing homes, with limited room for drainage and grading. A roof on a lot like that drains into a tight space, often beside a neighbor whose yard was graded long before the new house went up.
On those lots the downspout layout deserves as much thought as the shingle choice. We map where each leader can discharge before the gutters go up, so the plan is settled on paper rather than improvised on the last day.
Proposed Coverage Limits on R1 and R2 Lots
The 2019 update recommended cutting permissible impervious coverage on R1 lots, listed at 10,000 square feet, to half the lot, and setting a 60 percent limit on R2 lots of 6,000 square feet. Those were proposals in a plan update. We have not confirmed they were adopted, so read them as the direction the township was looking in 2019, not as rules on your lot today.
Whatever their status, a porch roof, a garage or an addition adds hard surface that sheds water. When a project adds roof area, we can tell you how much, which is a useful number to bring when you ask the township what applies.
Scheduling, Storms and Contracts
Haddon Township sits in National Weather Service forecast zone NJZ018, Camden, covered by the Mount Holly office. We watch that zone’s forecast before a tear-off so a roof is not left open ahead of rain. When a storm does damage, we photograph it and write it up for your own claim, and we will meet your adjuster on site if you ask.
Our contracts follow New Jersey’s home improvement rules, including the cancellation notice. If solar panels sit on the roof, their removal and reinstall go into the schedule from the start rather than being discovered on the morning the crew arrives.
- 20+ Years on Local Roofs
- Repair-First Advice
- Itemized Written Scopes
