After a bad cell rolls through Sioux Falls, Brandon or Dell Rapids, half the trucks on the street have out-of-state plates and every one of them says you need a roof. Some of you do. Plenty of you don’t. Here’s how to tell the difference before you let anyone on your house.
Hail damage almost never looks like damage
This is the part that trips people up. A hailstorm doesn’t usually punch through a roof. It bruises it.
A hail strike knocks the mineral granules loose in a roughly circular patch about the diameter of the stone that hit it. Under those granules is the asphalt mat, and the granules are the only thing protecting it from UV. Lose them and the mat starts aging fast from that day forward.
So the roof doesn’t leak that week. It looks more or less fine from the driveway. And four years later it fails early, long after the claim window closed.
What a bruise looks like up close:
- A dark circular spot where the surface is bare of granules
- Soft or spongy when pressed, because the mat behind it is fractured
- Random. Hail doesn’t follow a pattern, and damage in neat rows is usually something else, like foot traffic or manufacturing defect
Look at the soft metal first
You can’t assess a roof from the ground, but you can get a strong signal without leaving it. Hail hits everything, and soft metal shows what the shingles hide:
- Gutters and downspouts. Dents and dimples, especially on the up-facing surfaces.
- Vents, flashing and roof caps. Galvanized or aluminum vents dent easily.
- The AC condenser. Look at the fins on the top and the weather side.
- Window screens, mailboxes, the grill lid. All of them are evidence.
If the soft metal around your house took a beating, the roof did too, whether or not you can see it.
Granules in the gutters
The other reliable ground-level sign. Scoop out a downspout elbow or look where the downspout dumps.
A handful of granules after a new install is normal — that’s loose material shedding. A pile of them after a storm, on a roof that’s a few years old, is the roof telling you it lost surface.
What this means for an insurance claim
Three things worth knowing before you pick up the phone. The storm and hail repair page goes through the whole process in order:
A claim has a clock. Most policies want damage reported within a year of the storm date, some sooner. The bruise you can’t see today is still on the clock.
Cosmetic exclusions are real. Some carriers writing in South Dakota hail country issue policies that exclude cosmetic damage to metal. Worth knowing which you have before you assume the gutters are covered.
Filing a claim with no real damage does you no favors. It goes on your record. If someone walks your roof and tells you honestly there’s nothing claimable, that’s a useful answer, not a wasted trip.
The storm-chaser test
After a big cell, companies show up from three states away, knock every door in the neighborhood, offer to “waive your deductible,” and are gone by fall. A few things sort them out quickly:
- Ask where their office is and whether you can drive to it.
- Ask who will be on the roof — them, or a subcontractor they met last week.
- Anyone offering to cover your deductible is describing insurance fraud, and the person holding the policy is you.
- Anyone offering to file the claim for you is offering to do something that ranges from unhelpful to illegal. The claim has to come from you.
What we’d actually do
Get someone local on the roof with a camera before you call your insurer, and get an honest answer about whether you have a claim worth filing. If you do, have that person meet your adjuster on the roof and walk the damage with them — that’s the part that changes outcomes.
And if the answer is that your roof is fine, that’s the cheapest good news you’ll get all summer.
If the roof does need replacing, what a new roof actually costs in Sioux Falls covers the money and how long it takes to replace a roof covers the day itself. We work out of ten offices across South Dakota and the states around it.