Telling real hail damage from the rest

The soft metal test

Put the shingles aside for a minute and look at everything on the roof that is made of thin metal. Gutters and downspouts. The caps on turbine and box vents. The flashing around a chimney. A metal pergola or a shed roof in the yard. Air conditioner fins at the side of the house.

Hail that is big enough and hard enough to bruise a shingle will also dent those. It has no choice, they are softer than the roof. So if the soft metal is clean and somebody is telling you the shingles are covered in hail hits, then whatever made the marks on the shingles was not hail, and the claim is going to fail for exactly that reason when the adjuster runs the same check.

The reverse is just as useful. Dented gutters and clean looking shingles usually mean the hail was real and the roof damage is there but subtle, which is the case most worth pushing on.

What a bruise is

A hail bruise is an impact that has fractured the mat underneath the surface. What you see is a roughly circular spot with the granules knocked away. What matters is what you feel: press it and it gives slightly, like pressing a bruise on fruit. The mat below is broken even though the shingle has not opened up.

That is the damage that matters, because a fractured mat is where the shingle will crack later. It is also why hail damage is worth claiming even when nothing is leaking. Nothing leaks on the day. It leaks in three years.

Genuine hail is scattered at random across every slope that faced the sky, with no pattern and no clustering in walk paths. The count per square is the thing adjusters are measuring.

The three things that get mistaken for it

Blistering is the big one. Asphalt shingles form small bubbles from trapped moisture or heat and those bubbles pop, leaving round bare spots that photograph almost identically to hail. The difference is underneath. A blister is hollow or hard and the mat is intact. A bruise is soft. Blisters also tend to cluster on the hottest slope rather than spreading evenly.

Mechanical damage is second. Somebody walking a hot roof scuffs granules off in lines and patches that follow a route. A dropped tool leaves a single mark in the wrong place. Any pattern that looks like somebody moved through it probably was somebody moving through it.

Manufacturing loss is third. Some shingles simply shed granules unevenly as they age, most visibly in the gutter as a build up of grit. That is wear, it is not covered, and it is a common reason a claim gets denied when the homeowner was genuinely acting in good faith.

What to do in the first week

Note the date and which storm. Photograph the soft metal as well as the roof, because that is your evidence either way. Photograph the yard. Do not let anybody get up there and start marking the roof with chalk before the adjuster has seen it in its original state.

Then read how the claim itself works, because the order of steps there matters more than almost anything else you do.