Hail Damage Roof Inspection in Houston: What You’re Missing
A hail damage roof inspection usually gets ordered for one of two reasons: something started leaking, or the neighbor’s roof got torn off and replaced and now you’re standing in the driveway squinting at yours. Both of those are late. Hail that fell in April can sit up there doing quiet work for a year before a single drop shows up on your ceiling, and by then your carrier has a reasonable argument that whatever’s wrong came from something else. Houston’s hail season runs March through May. Some years it’s one twenty-minute window on a Tuesday afternoon that nobody remembers by Friday. The NWS Houston/Galveston storm data archive will tell you what actually passed over your zip code. Hail doesn’t dent a roof the way it dents a truck You know what hail does to a hood. Dimples. Obvious, right there in the parking lot at H-E-B. Asphalt shingles don’t work that way. A shingle is a fiberglass mat coated in asphalt with ceramic granules pressed into the top, and those granules are the sunscreen. They’re what keeps UV off the asphalt underneath. When a stone hits hard enough it knocks granules loose and fractures the mat below. Roofers call that a bruise. Press on it and it gives a little, like the soft spot on a banana. Nothing is punctured. Nothing is leaking. But the asphalt in that circle is now bare to a sun that does not let up, and somewhere in the next twelve to twenty-four months the bruise opens into a real hole. Roughly one-inch hail is where asphalt starts taking damage, though a ten-year-old roof off Long Point will bruise from stones a newer roof shrugs off. Wind angle matters more than people think. Hail coming in at 45 degrees hammers the slope facing the storm and leaves the other three basically clean, which is why an inspection that only looks at one side of the house tells you close to nothing. Metal panels dent, and the coating cracks along the dent, and that’s where rust starts. Tile cracks, and the crack hides under the overlap of the tile above it. A hail damage roof inspection has to account for all of that. Why you miss it from the driveway From the ground you’re looking at a roof edge-on at a bad angle through 25 feet of air. Granule loss reads as slightly darker shingle, which reads as shadow, which reads as nothing. Bruising is invisible from below, period — there’s no dimple to catch light. The clue most people do notice is granules in the gutters, sitting there like coarse black sand. That’s real, but it isn’t conclusive. Roofs shed granules slowly their whole life, and a hard rain washes a normal amount down. Climbing up isn’t the answer either. A wet composition roof at a 7/12 pitch is genuinely dangerous, and walking a hail-bruised roof can leave marks that look like impact damage, which is a headache you don’t want during an adjuster visit. That’s most of why a hail damage roof inspection moved to drones. We covered the tradeoffs in drone versus traditional roof inspections. What a hail damage roof inspection looks like from the air Here’s the actual sequence on a residential job. If the property sits in controlled airspace, and plenty of west Houston does between Bush, Hooks and Sugar Land Regional, we file for LAANC authorization. That clears in minutes, not days. Then we walk the perimeter and note the trees and power lines. The flight itself is two passes. A nadir grid first, straight down, high overlap, so the photos stitch into one orthomosaic of the roof plane with no perspective distortion. Then low, slow oblique orbits at maybe 15 to 25 feet above the deck, gimbal angled, shooting the individual slopes. That second pass is where damage shows up. At that range you can resolve a granule-loss circle the size of a quarter and tell whether the pattern is random, which reads as hail, or lined up along the fasteners, which reads as bad installation. Everything comes off the card geotagged and timestamped. That matters more than the pictures do, which I’ll get to. Most residential roofs take 20 to 35 minutes of flight time, and nobody sets foot on the shingles. That matters if you’ve ever had a “free inspection” guy up there with a chalk line. Rest of what we cover is under aerial inspections. Why a hail damage roof inspection matters to your adjuster Texas gives you a claim window, and carriers are strict about date of loss. The Texas Department of Insurance storm recovery guidance lays out how the process is supposed to run. Worth ten minutes before you call anybody. What documentation buys you is specificity. An adjuster who shows up eight weeks after the storm is looking at a roof that’s been rained on six more times. A dated set of high-resolution images from three days after the event, with GPS coordinates baked into the file, is a different kind of evidence than a phone photo taken from a ladder. It also helps on supplements. If the adjuster approves two slopes and you know all four took hits, having the imagery on the north and east elevations gives your roofer something to argue with instead of a memory. That’s not adversarial, it’s just how the process works when two people are looking at the same roof at different times. One thing worth being straight about. A hail damage roof inspection documents condition. It doesn’t write your estimate or adjust your claim. Your roofer and your carrier do that. Thermal won’t find the bruise, but it finds what comes next Infrared doesn’t see a fractured mat. Common misconception. What it sees is trapped moisture, because wet insulation and saturated decking shed heat differently than dry material, and that shows up on a cooling roof at dusk. So thermal is the follow-up tool, not the first one. If hail opened the roof last spring and water’s been getting in
