Hail Damage to Skylights, Vents and Roof Penetrations

A dent in an aluminum furnace vent is a dated artifact. Freshly struck aluminum shows a light, almost silver crater floor, and it oxidizes back to dull gray over a season or two in Midwest air. That gives an experienced inspector, and a fair adjuster, a rough read on whether the damage came from the storm being claimed or from one four years ago. Pipe boot collars, gutter aprons, drip edge, counterflashing and the fins on your air conditioning condenser all behave the same way. We photograph them with something in frame for scale, usually a quarter or a tape, and we note which elevation each one came from.

The rubber collar around a plumbing vent is the shortest-lived component on most roofs, and hail accelerates it hard. A strike splits the rubber where it's already thinning from UV, or it deforms the metal base so the collar no longer sits tight to the pipe. Neither one leaks immediately. It leaks the first time wind-driven rain pushes water sideways under the lifted edge, and then the water runs down the outside of the pipe into the ceiling below, which is why a boot failure so often gets misdiagnosed as a plumbing problem. On any full replacement after hail, every boot on the roof gets replaced. They cost almost nothing and they are the single most common source of a callback.

Metal turbines dent on the housing and on the vanes, and a dented vane throws the bearing out of balance so the unit squeals in the wind afterward. The squeal is a symptom, not the damage. Plastic box vents and the end caps on ridge vent go brittle with age and crack rather than dent, and the crack is easy to miss because it usually runs along a molded seam. Ridge vent takes a beating because it sits at the highest point on the roof and the stone hits it closest to perpendicular. We pull a section of ridge cap when the ridge looks suspect, since the fracture shows from underneath long before it shows on top.

A tempered glass skylight either survives hail or it doesn't, and when it doesn't you know that afternoon. Acrylic and polycarbonate domes are the quieter problem. They craze, meaning a web of fine surface fractures that scatters the light and looks a little like frost, and once the surface is opened up UV works into the material until it yellows and goes brittle. That takes years. The other failure is the flashing kit. Step and head flashing around a curb-mounted unit can be dented or lifted by the same stone, and a lifted head flashing puts water straight into the curb. Most skylight leaks we get called out for turn out to be flashing rather than glazing.

Usually yes, when they're part of the covered scope and damaged in the same event. Vents, boots, turbines and flashings are standard line items in the estimating software adjusters work from, and they get missed on a first estimate far more often than they get deliberately denied. That is what a supplement is for. Skylights are a harder conversation. A carrier will generally pay to replace glazing that's broken or clearly crazed and will push back on a dated unit that's simply old. If the skylight is an original builder-grade unit from the nineties, expect to argue the point, and expect the answer to depend partly on which adjuster shows up.

On a penetration walk we open the attic wherever there's access, because half of what hail does to vents shows from the inside first. Daylight around a boot collar. Staining on the sheathing under a ridge vent. Rust streaks below a box vent where the flashing has been working loose. We also look at the bathroom and kitchen exhaust hoods, which are usually thin painted steel and dent as readily as anything up there, and the chimney cap and chase cover if the house has a chimney. A dented chase cover holds water and rusts through from the top down, and by the time it shows up in the firebox it has become a masonry job.

This is the shortcut that turns a good roof into a warranty argument. New shingles set around a nine-year-old pipe boot means the boot fails in three or four years, and somebody has to cut into nearly new work to fix it. Reusing dented flashing because it's still technically watertight is the same mistake with a different part. Our standard scope replaces boots, vent flashings and pipe collars on a full replacement, and we'll tell you before you sign if the estimate we're working from leaves them out. When a bid you've been handed is noticeably cheaper than ours, this is usually where the difference lives.