Tips From Your Tennessee Roofing For How To Spot Potential Roof Damage

In order to know when your roof needs to be repaired, you must know how to spot signs of weathering and weather damage on your shingles. Making the occasional visual inspection from the ground will alert you to potential problems on the parts of the roof that you can see, but monitoring those sections of the roof that you can't see from street level can make the job even trickier. Here's how to know when to call your Chattanooga roofing expert in to have a closer look.

Obvious Damage

There are occasionally times when you simply know that damage has occurred on your roof. Your Tennessee roofing professional should be called in for repairs without hesitation in the event that your area experiences extreme weather. When hailstones reach golf ball size, they are causing damage every time they impact your roof. If a large tree branch comes down on a section of your home, or a large chunk of debris blows in and lands on your shingles, you should assume that there has been damage and have it repaired immediately.

Fall Foliage

Those trees that provide shade around your home are beautiful, but the leaves that they drop on your roof are a potential source of damage. Unless you keep these leaves off your roof by removing them forcibly, they will begin to rot where they lay. This will result in sources of rot being introduced to the shingle surface, which can cause breaches in the water proofing that the shingles depend on. If you have leaves that have completely rotted away, and can clearly see the outlines they left behind, then you should summon your Chattanooga roofing expert to have a look.


Visible Mold

Mold is great, when it's on rocks and the sides of trees. When you can see spots of mold on your roof, you need to call in your Tennessee roofing specialist immediately. Where there is mold, there is moisture, and enough of a breach in your roof's defenses for the mold to have taken root to begin with. Although some homeowners consider mold on the roof to add an air of charm, it should be viewed as a dangerous situation and dealt with promptly to prevent further damage.


Interior Leaks

You hope to spot trouble on your roof before it comes to interior leaks, but sometimes the unexpected happens. When you wake to the rhythmic dripping of water on your carpet, grab a bucket and settle in for the long haul. Hope that this rainstorm doesn't last for the next three straight days, and summon your Chattanooga roofing specialist immediately. The problem with a leak is that where the water enters your home may not be anywhere near where the roof is letting the water in. Having the roof searched promptly is the only way to prevent this small leak from becoming a catastrophic roof failure.

5 Reasons To Let Knoxville Roofers Protect Your Gutters

While your current gutter system is designed to protect your home from being exposed to rain water and snow melt, you have to ask yourself if you're happy with the way the entire system works. Not just how the water is captured, or how the system looks in relation to your entire house, but the entire package.

Here are 5 reasons why you should consider having your gutter system improved by your Knoxville roofing specialists.

Gutter Overflow - Having your gutters overflow can be more than just an annoyance. Any point where your gutter overflows is a location where all of that concentrated runoff is splashing down around your home. This escaped storm water pools along the perimeter of your home, and can lead to flooding, leaks, and rot taking up residence within your home. Protected gutters change the angle that the water enters your gutter system at, reducing overflow risk and fixing those stubborn corner spots that overflow in every storm.

Ice Dams - Here at Weather Tamer, Your Chattanooga roofing specialists will be the first to tell you how much damage a frozen dam of ice can cause to your entire gutter system. Instead of the melt water draining away like it is supposed to, that solid block of ice will cause this water to pool in your gutters and along your roof. Before you know it, you'll end up with damage to your roof and leaks inside your home. Our gutter systems keep your drains clear, preventing these ice dams from forming.

 

Debris Clogs - An unprotected gutter system will collect the debris that washes off of your roof. After a hard storm and frequently during the fall season, your gutters will be overrun with leaves and twigs. Your unprotected system will form hazardous clogs that will back water up, and introduce rot and mold in close proximity to your home. As your Knoxville roofing specialist will tell you, the gutter protection system creates such a small gap along your gutters that water may enter, but this and other types of debris will not. Debris washes straight off the roof, leaving your gutters clear.
 

Peace Of Mind - What better way is there to know that your gutter system can handle the spring storms than with gutter protection? Our Chattanooga roofing specialists will be able to install these systems in only a couple of days along your gutters. Since we only employ licensed and certified technicians, never sub-contractors, you know that your installation will be completed on time and finished correctly.

Weather Resistant - You don't need to worry about our gutter protection system blowing off in a bad storm. Our Chattanooga and Knoxville roofers install this system at a low angle that prevents the wind from getting under it and ripping it off your roof. Whatever spring can throw at you, our gutter protection system will keep your home same and looking good.

Guide to Hiring a Tennessee Roofing Contractor

The average life of your roof, unless it's a very specialty material, is going to be about fifteen years. If you're approaching the age of fifteen for your roofing, it may be time to start considering a new roof and to begin looking for a Chattanooga roofing contractor to install it for you. It isn't likely that you're going to get much more than twenty years from your plain asphalt roofing no matter where you live. If your roofing is older than this, chances are good that you should simply plan to replace the roofing this year.

A Chattanooga roofing company will be best equipped to install your new roof and to make sure that you get a quality material and installation. Befor your select your roofing company, it's always best to check them out thoroughly. The first step will be to get recommendations on roofers from your family and friends. Getting a few ideas from them will save you time on the beginning portion of the search for a new roofing contractor. Most of your friends and family have had to replace a roof at one time or another. Find out who they used, how happy they were and if the price was reasonable. Even if you don't have a lot of friends who have used a given roofing company, get a quote from several. The quote should be very detailed, telling you precisely what they offer you, the work that will be done, exactly what the cost will be and the precise or at least a close approximation for the time frame. You need to know when the job is going to be completed.

Make sure that all of the job is included in the price that you are quoted. In most cases, roofers will clean up after themselves, but in some cases that won't be included in your pricing. If you don't want to be cleaning up the mess that is left behind by your Tennessee roofing company, check it out and add that to your overall price quote.

Next you need to make sure that you're getting all that you want in the roofing company themselves. The Tennessee roofing company that you hire needs to have a few things going for them before you even consider their services.

Things that you should look for include:

• Longevity in the business. You should be sure that they have a least a few years in the roofing business.

• Check out their license as a contractor. In many areas, you cannot hire a contractor who does not have a local business license. In fact, it's probably better if you don't because chances are good they aren't legal to work in this area.

•  Ask them if they have a physical address. If they don't at least have an office in a local home, they are probably not a company that you want to use because you have no real recourse if they don't do what they say that they will.

• Make sure that they have insurance as a contractor. If they don't, this is not a company that you can afford to use. If something is broken or someone is injured, they aren't going to be able to make that right.

• Check your local building codes to make sure that your company is adhering to all of them. You're liable if they don't.

• Get a permit to do what you want done. You can't always depend on the company to do so; keep track of the permits yourself.

NEVER allow yourself to be rushed into hiring a roofing contractor. Make sure that the local company that you hire is legal, is ethical and is well checked out before they start your roofing job.

Hail Damage and Hail Resistant Roofing in Tennessee

Tennessee is known for the rolling hills, the beautiful skies and the vast array of scenery that ranges from mountain capes to beautiful rivers. It is also known for the hail that falls frequently in the summertime storms. Tennessee gets hail about 5-10 times per year. While not always large or outrageous, it can be heavy enough to do some very real damage to the roofing installed on some of the older homes.

Residents on Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville can depend on the fact that they are going to have some sort of property damage each year from the winds or the hail. In 2011 alone the hail damage in one county in Tennessee topped the million dollar mark. The effect of hail on Tennessee roofing can't be understated. In fact hail doesn't just damage roofing alone, it can also do some vast damage to even insulated vinyl siding, causing dents or tears to the siding.

Once a hail storm in Tennessee has passed, it's advisable to contact a Tennessee roofing professional in order to get an inspection of your home. To the naked eye, it's not always easy for a person who isn't a professional to determine if there has been damage and what the extent of the damage may be. Even very small hail can cause damage to your home that you may not easily see. A trained Tennessee contractor can look over every area of your home that may be prone to damage such as the gutters, the siding, the fences, and the roofs and let you know if there is any damage that needs to be repaired.

In many cases, Tennessee roofing professionals will give you a free roofing inspection, telling you the extent of the damage and giving you repair options and ballpark figures on the same day that they visit your home. He or she will tell you if you have sufficient damage to contact your insurance company to arrange for roof repairs.

One thing that many Tennessee homeowners opt in for is hail proof roofing. If you must repair or replace your existing roof, you might want to opt in for hail resistant roofing. No roofing can be completely hail proof, but you can get various ratings to make it more resistant to hail damage. Hail resistant roofing is classified in four different categories, depending on how resilient that it is to hail storms. The shingles have a quality that makes them like rubber so that the hail bounces rather than damaging the roof. If you’re interested in hail resistant roofing, it may be something that you want to discuss with your Tennessee roofing contractor during your home inspection.