What Else Should You Check for Hail Damage Besides the Roof?

The soft metals, first and always. Gutters, downspouts, vent hoods, flashing, the fins on your air conditioner, and anything aluminium at ground level. They dent where a shingle only bruises, which makes them the easiest surface on the property to read and the one that tells you what size hail actually fell. After that: siding, windows and screens, garage doors, and painted wood. Arrowhead Roofing has documented northeast Oklahoma storm damage since 1987, and a roof inspection that never leaves the roof is only half an inspection.

Note: this is a general guide to where hail damage shows up. It is not a statement about what any policy covers. Whether a particular surface is covered, and on what terms, is between you and your carrier. Arrowhead Roofing is not a licensed public adjuster.

Six surfaces, in the order a competent inspection covers them.

The Short Answer

A shingle is a difficult surface to read and a downspout is an easy one. That is the whole reason this page exists.

Hail damage on asphalt is a bruise: granules displaced, asphalt exposed, and a fracture you often identify by feel rather than by eye. Reasonable people disagree about it, which is why so much of the hail cluster on this site is about telling real damage from things that look like it.

Soft metal does not have that problem. A dent is a dent. It is the same storm, on the same property, on the same day, recorded on a surface nobody argues about.

One Thing That Looks Like Damage and Is Not

Worth knowing before you go looking, because it will be the first thing you find.

Spatter marks are not damage. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety describes spatter as what happens when hail knocks oxidation or dirt off a metal surface. You get clean circular marks on a dirty gutter, a vent, or a painted surface. They look dramatic and they are extremely useful, because they are evidence a storm happened here and roughly how big the stones were.

What they are not is a dent. A spatter mark that has not deformed the metal has not damaged it. Reporting spatter as damage is a quick way to lose credibility with an adjuster, and reading it correctly is a quick way to gain some.

The Air Conditioner, Which Almost Everybody Forgets

The condenser unit sits outside, uncovered, with a coil of thin aluminium fins wrapped around it, and it takes the same storm the roof does.

Flattened fins restrict airflow across the coil, which makes the unit work harder for less cooling. In an Oklahoma summer that is not a cosmetic problem. It is also unambiguous: fins do not flatten themselves, and they flatten on the side the storm came from, which corroborates everything else you found.

We are roofers and we do not repair air conditioners. We photograph them, because a hail inspection that ignores the most obviously damaged thing in the garden is not a serious inspection.

Siding, and Why It Is Its Own Conversation

Siding is the second most commonly damaged surface in a hail event and it behaves nothing like a roof.

Vinyl cracks and punctures rather than bruising, and it does so more readily when it is cold and more readily still as it ages. Damage concentrates on the elevation the storm faced, which is why one wall can be obviously hit while the other three look untouched.

That single-elevation pattern is where the difficult questions start, and they are questions about policy language rather than about roofing. Does insurance cover hail damage to siding? covers what is actually settled and what is not.

What Changes the Answer

Three things decide how much of this matters on a given property.

Which way the storm came from

Hail arrives at an angle rather than straight down. Everything above concentrates on the windward side, and a competent inspection establishes that direction early and then uses it to know where to look hardest.

What the property is made of

Brick with metal soffit and vinyl-clad windows takes a storm very differently from wood siding and wood-framed screens. The materials decide which surfaces record the event.

How long ago it happened

Fresh damage on metal is bright where the coating has been broken. Older damage weathers and gets harder to date, which is the same problem the roof has. How can you tell old hail damage from new hail damage? covers the colour test that settles it on shingles.

What We Do, and What We Do Not Do

Arrowhead Roofing is not a licensed public adjuster. We do not negotiate insurance claims. We provide roof inspections, document storm damage, and meet with insurance adjusters to support the inspection process.

On a hail inspection we photograph the collateral surfaces as well as the roof, because they are part of the evidence about what happened. Whether any of them is covered, and on what terms, is between you and your carrier.

Related Questions

Does the policy cover the siding too?

It is a genuinely different question from the roof, and matching is where it gets hard. Does insurance cover hail damage to siding? covers what Oklahoma does and does not require.

What does hail damage look like on the roof itself?

A bruise rather than a dent, and it is identified by feel as much as by eye. What does hail damage look like on a roof? covers the field test.

What about a metal roof?

Only certain dents matter, and some policies exclude the cosmetic ones. Will insurance pay for hail damage to a metal roof? covers the distinction.

See Also

The two answers next to this one are what an adjuster is looking at, and how to find out what hail has actually hit your address.