What a documented hail inspection actually covers

The word inspection is doing a lot of work in this industry, and it covers everything from a genuine documented survey to a man walking around your house for six minutes so that he can knock on the door and say your roof is destroyed. It is worth knowing what the real version consists of, so that you can tell which one you are getting.

Before the ladder goes up

The ground survey comes first, because it is free information and it shapes everything after it. Elevations are walked, soft metal is checked, the condenser fins are looked at, and the storm date is established from what you remember and from what the weather record shows for your county. The age of the roof, the number of layers if that is known, and any previous repair work all get noted, because a fifteen year old three tab and a four year old architectural shingle bruise at completely different thresholds.

On the roof

• Every slope, individually. North, south, east and west faces are surveyed and photographed separately, because storms are directional and a report that averages the whole roof tells nobody anything.
• The test square. A ten foot by ten foot square is chalked out on each slope and the impacts inside it are counted and marked. This is the standard way a hail finding gets quantified, and it is the language an adjuster works in. A slope with a handful of hits in a hundred square feet is a different conversation from a slope with thirty.
• Bruises found by hand. Suspected soft hits are pressed and confirmed by touch, then circled in chalk so they are visible in a photograph. This is the part that cannot be done with a drone.
• Sealant strips. Tabs are lifted at random along the field to check whether the adhesive strip is intact, because broken strips are a wind failure waiting to happen and they do not show from above.
• All roof metal. Valley metal, drip edge, ridge vent, box vents, turbines, pipe boot collars, chimney and step flashing, and any skylight surround.
• Everything that is not hail. Blisters, foot traffic, tool damage, nail pops, exposed fasteners, prior repairs, curling, and any manufacturing pattern get identified as such and separated out.
• Measurements. Slope lengths, pitch, squares of roof area, ridge and hip footage, valley footage, penetration count.

Underneath, and inside

Where there is access, the attic gets a look. Daylight through the decking, staining on rafters or on the underside of the sheathing, damp insulation, and the condition of the ventilation path all matter, and some of them explain problems that have nothing to do with the storm at all. Interior ceilings below valleys and around chimneys get checked from the room side.

What you get at the end

Photographs, organised by elevation and dated. The test square results. The measurements. And a written scope: a description of what was found, slope by slope, and what the repair or replacement would consist of, itemised in the way a roof is actually built rather than as one number at the bottom of a page. If decking replacement is a possibility, the scope says in advance what the rate for that is, because soft boards only appear once the old roof is off and that is a poor moment to be negotiating.

You keep all of it regardless of what you decide to do next. If the finding is that the roof is fine, you get that in writing too, which is genuinely worth having: it is a dated baseline for the next storm, and this metro will supply one.

Two practical notes

Do not climb up yourself. Falls from residential ladders are one of the more common serious home injuries in the country, and a wet or hail-glazed roof is worse than a dry one. There is also a second reason: walking an aged asphalt roof causes granule displacement and scuffing that looks like damage and muddies the record you are trying to build.

An inspection is not a repair estimate for something else. If the finding is age rather than storm, that is a different conversation with a different economic logic, and it deserves to be labelled honestly rather than reframed as a storm claim.