How to tell if your Tennessee roof has hail damage

Middle Tennessee sits in a hail corridor. Rutherford County east of Murfreesboro takes it most years, and the storms that matter are rarely the ones people remember — a five-minute burst of pea-sized hail while you were at work does more to a roof than an hour of dramatic rain.

The reason it matters is that hail damage is cumulative and delayed. A roof does not leak the week it is hit. It leaks two or three years later, after the exposed mat has weathered through, by which time the storm date is outside your insurer's filing window.

What hail actually does

A hailstone does not punch a hole. It bruises.

The impact fractures the fiberglass mat inside the shingle and knocks the protective granules off the surface. What is left is a soft spot where the asphalt is exposed to UV directly. That spot ages at several times the rate of the shingle around it.

So what you are looking for is not a hole. It is:

• Granules in the gutters and at the downspout splash blocks. Some granule loss is normal for a new roof. A sudden accumulation after a storm is not.
• Dark, round spots on the shingle surface where the granules are gone and the asphalt shows through. They are usually the size of a coin and randomly scattered — that randomness is the tell.
• Dents on soft metal. Gutters, downspouts, vents, flashing and the metal cap on a chimney. Soft metal records the storm accurately, which is why an adjuster looks there first.
• Split or bruised ridge caps. The ridge takes the most direct hit and is the easiest place to see damage from the ground with binoculars.

Check these first, from the ground

Do not get on the roof. A hail-damaged roof is a roof with loose granules on it, which is the same thing as ball bearings on a slope.

From the ground you can check the gutters, the downspout outlets, the soft metal, the window screens and the deck furniture. If the window screens are dimpled and the AC fins are flattened, the roof took the same storm.

Also worth checking: the mailbox, the grill lid, and anything painted on the north and west faces of the house — those are the faces the storms here usually come from.

Why the storm you remember is often the wrong one

Insurers work from recorded hail events at your address, not from your recollection. When somebody calls us about "the storm last month", the damage frequently traces to an event eighteen months earlier that nobody noticed at the time.

That is worth knowing before you file, because a claim tied to the wrong date is a claim that gets denied on the date rather than on the damage.

What to do next, in order

1. Photograph what you can see from the ground, with the date. Gutters, soft metal, screens, anything dimpled.
2. Get an inspection before you call the insurer. An adjuster is assessing a claim; an inspection tells you whether you have one. Those are different jobs, and doing them in that order means you are not filing blind.
3. Do not sign anything with somebody who knocked on your door. After a hailstorm, Middle Tennessee fills with out-of-state crews. Ask for the Tennessee license, and ask who is doing the work — not who is selling it.

When it is not a claim

Sometimes it is not. Granule loss on a twenty-year-old roof is the roof ending, not a storm. Cracks that run with the grain of the shingle are thermal splitting. Both get reported as hail by people selling claims, and neither is.

We will tell you when the answer is "your roof is fine, check again after the next one." That is a shorter conversation than a denied claim.

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Storm damage in Nashville, Murfreesboro or the counties around them? Call (615) 418-6087. An inspection is a real look at the roof, not a windshield estimate from the driveway.