Hail Damage Roof Repair in Sterling Heights, MI

A hailstone hitting an asphalt shingle doesn't grind the granules. It knocks them off the sides of the impact and presses the rest down into the asphalt, leaving a dark, roughly round spot. InterNACHI uses that as a test: crushed, powdery granules point to a hammer or a boot, not hail. A harder hit can also crack the fiberglass mat under the asphalt, which feels soft when you press it with a thumb. That bruise is the damage that matters, because the crack lets the shingle break down and leak years before it should. Real hail lands at random across a slope, edge to notch, with overlapping hits, so inspectors usually check a marked test area on each slope, counting hits and photographing them in chalk. Granules piled at the downspout outlets after a storm are a clue worth checking from the ground.

Metal roofs are where hail arguments start. Most hail leaves cosmetic dents: round dimples in the flat pans that change how the roof looks but not how it sheds water. In an EDT Engineers article on hail and metal panels, Kirchmer calls damage functional when it does one of two things. Either it breaks the factory coating that protects the steel from rust (checked under magnification for chipping, cracking or crazing), or it hurts water-shedding, most often through a dent at a sealed side seam. A dent at a seam can be water-tested before anyone decides the whole roof has to go. Whether a policy pays for purely cosmetic dents comes down to its wording, so read yours or ask your agent before the adjuster visits.

Flat roofs over attached garages, porches and additions take hail straight on, since the stones fall at nearly a right angle to the surface. How the membrane holds up depends on what's under it. InterNACHI notes that well-supported surfaces resist hail better than poorly supported ones, so a membrane over soft fiberboard or crushed foam insulation is the one to worry about. Fully adhered EPDM has a good record. In a 2016 Texas hailstorm survey, three EPDM roofs hit by 1- to 3-inch hail showed no punctures or fractures, according to the EPDM Roofing Association, an industry group. That data doesn't cover white TPO or older, brittle membranes, which need a close look at seams, flashings and any spot that feels soft underfoot. Small punctures get cleaned and patched with the same membrane. Widespread fractures mean a new roof on that section. Membrane types and costs are on the flat roofing page.

Aluminum box vents, ridge-vent caps, aluminum gutters and downspouts dent easily, and the pattern of dents shows the direction the storm came from and roughly how big the stones were. InterNACHI notes that hail dents in aluminum are usually a little smaller than the stones that made them, and that steel gutters hold up far better than aluminum, with copper in between. Those dents are collateral evidence: they help prove a storm hit the house, but a dented gutter on its own doesn't mean the shingles are damaged. The reverse is also true, so an inspector checks both. Bent vent caps and crushed downspouts get replaced. Gutters with deep dents along the front may be replaced too, or left if they still drain, which is a choice to make with your adjuster's figures in hand.

Wood shakes split as they age, which makes hail damage on cedar easy to argue about. The difference is in the split itself. According to InterNACHI, a fresh split from a hailstone, a falling branch or a footstep has sharp edges and orange wood inside. Over several months the exposed wood weathers to gray. A weathering split has rounded edges and is the same gray inside as on the surface, and it's usually widest at the butt. So the time to document a cedar roof is soon after the storm, before the new splits fade to match the old ones. Repairs mean pulling the split shake and slipping a new one in with a metal shim or a new shake underneath. The cedar shake roofing page covers grades and replacement.