5 Warning signs your roof needs repair

The five things we find on almost every failing Tampa roof

Roofs here rarely fail all at once. They fail at one detail, quietly, for a season or two, and then a storm finds the weakness. By the time a stain appears on a bedroom ceiling the water has usually been in the decking for months. The five signs below are the ones our inspectors write up most often across Hillsborough and Pinellas, and four of them you can check from the ground with a phone camera.

• Granules collecting in the gutters or at the bottom of downspouts
• Shingles that look lifted, curled or darker in patches after a storm
• Cracked or slipped barrel tile, especially along hips and ridges
• Daylight visible through the attic boards, or a musty smell up there

Age is the fifth sign and the one people argue with most. A three-tab shingle roof in Tampa is usually finished somewhere between fifteen and eighteen years, and a lot of Florida carriers start asking questions well before that. If your roof went on before 2011 it is worth an inspection whether or not you can see anything wrong.

What to do before you call anyone

Take photographs from the ground on all four sides, and take them in daylight rather than at dusk. If you have older photos of the house, find them. Nothing strengthens a claim like a clear before and after. Do not climb up yourself to check, and do not let anyone who knocked on your door after a storm climb up either without showing you a Florida licence number first.

Half the emergency calls we take in September could have been a routine repair in June. Roofs give plenty of warning. People just do not know what they are looking at.

If you find two or more of these signs, book an inspection rather than a repair. A good inspector will tell you which of them actually matter on your roof and which are cosmetic, and will put that in writing. We do ours free across Tampa Bay, and about a third of them end with us telling the homeowner to do nothing at all this year.