Shingle Roofing
Ask a roofer what is under your shingles and you will learn more in thirty seconds than a brochure will tell you in a week. The shingles are the visible layer of a system, and most leaks begin in the parts nobody can see once the work is finished: the wood deck, the underlayment, the drip edge at eaves and rakes, the bonded starter course, and metal flashing at every valley, wall, chimney and pipe. Shingle roofing is the most common roof in the country and the one APC Roofing works on most — new installs, storm and age damage, and full replacements.
Two families, and the numbers that separate them
Shingles come in two broad shapes: the flat three-tab strip and the thicker laminated product sold as architectural. They differ in weight, appearance, wind resistance, impact resistance and service life, and the differences are published rather than a matter of opinion. Functional hail damage begins at around one inch of stone diameter on a three-tab, roughly an inch and a quarter on a laminated shingle, and nearer an inch and a half on the heavier laminated products — against a National Weather Service severe-storm threshold of one inch. If you want the top impact class, Class 4 under UL 2218, understand what it means: a two-inch steel ball dropped from twenty feet, twice onto the same spot, with nothing cracking through the back of the mat. Wind classes under ASTM D7158 run D at 90 mph, G at 120 and H at 150, and each was earned on a sample fastened exactly as the manufacturer instructs — which in practice means six nails per shingle for the top wind warranty, not the four that cover a standard job, and every nail inside the narrow zone printed across the shingle. Whether the impact class is worth paying for is a question with a public answer: the Storm Prediction Center logs where damaging hail actually falls, season after season.
What wears a shingle roof out
Sun is the slow killer. Ultraviolet exposure bakes the flexibility out of the asphalt, and the granules shielding it wash into the gutters — that coarse grit in the downspout is the roof's own status report. Wind is the fast one: once a tab lifts, its seal is broken for good, and the next gust finds the same loose edge. Underneath both sits ventilation. An attic that cannot breathe cooks the shingles from below, and the code baseline of one square foot of net free ventilating area per 150 square feet of attic is the figure to check, not the 1:300 ratio people quote from memory — that halving is an exception, earned by placing 40 to 50 percent of the vent area within three feet of the ridge and the balance at the eaves. Add overhanging limbs and a deck that was already soft on installation day, and a roof can lose a third of its expected life while looking perfectly normal from the driveway.
How the decision usually gets made
A roof missing a dozen shingles after a squall line is a different situation from a roof with brittle, cupping shingles on every slope and bare patches on the south face, and the questions that separate them are ones you can ask directly. Is the damage on one slope or several? Do the surrounding shingles flex or crack when handled? Is the deck dry? What share of a new roof would the repair cost? Photographs of the actual conditions are what turn that into a decision rather than a guess. Customers write about inspections here that ended with nothing to sell — a roof confirmed sound, no work booked — often enough that it is worth saying plainly that an inspection finding nothing is a normal outcome, not a wasted trip.
