Free Hail Damage Roof Inspection

There is a real difference between a look and an inspection. A look is somebody standing in your driveway with binoculars telling you what they think. An inspection means getting on the roof, working every elevation, and producing evidence. We chalk a ten-by-ten test square on each slope and count the hail impacts inside it, because most carriers make their damage determination on a strikes-per-square basis and a claim without that count is an opinion. We photograph the soft metals separately - gutter faces, downspout elbows, furnace and plumbing vents, valley metal, the air conditioning condenser fins - because those surfaces dent when hail falls and they date the storm. We check the ridge caps, which take the worst of it on most roofs, and we lift shingles where we need to confirm whether the mat is fractured underneath.

Shingles are ambiguous. A granule-loss pattern can be hail or it can be twenty years of weather, and a skeptical adjuster is entitled to ask which. Soft metals are not ambiguous. A fresh hail dent in an aluminum gutter apron exposes bright, unweathered metal at the bottom of the impact, and it holds that appearance for months. When we can put a photograph of a dented vent hood next to a photograph of a bruised shingle on the same slope, the shingle damage stops being a matter of opinion. This is the single most useful thing an inspection produces and it is the thing rushed inspections skip.

A written summary, the dated photographs, the test square counts by elevation, and a plain-English recommendation. Sometimes that recommendation is that you do not have a claim, and we will tell you that. A roof with cosmetic granule loss and no mat fracture is a roof that has more life in it, and filing a claim that gets denied puts a claim on your record for nothing. We would rather be the company that told you the truth and got the call in three years.

After a significant hail event across a Midwest metro, inspection demand spikes hard for about two weeks. We take calls in the order they come in and we prioritize anything actively leaking for emergency tarping ahead of routine inspections. If water is coming into your house right now, say so when you call and you go to the front of the line.