As a homeowner, you should know how important your roof is. There’s a reason people refer to shelter as a roof over their head, and why when you try to sell a home, the first thing usually asked is the state of said roof. It’s actually logical because your roof is unimaginably crucial to your home’s habitability and safety.
This isn’t just to say it keeps the weather and rain off of you, it’s also a line of defense against that weather for the house itself. Infestations can happen wit ha shoddy roof, and animals are dangerous most of the time, fail to mention destructive.
Your roof also helps to contain your HVAC, so you’re not air conditioning the block, or heating it in the winter. If you hemorrhage air like that, your power bill will go through the roof, no pun intended.
Finally, it keeps water damage at bay. Water damage is the most insidious single force that acts against a home, aside from perhaps termites, which is a whole other set of problems (which a good roof helps abate).
Water damage will cause black mold to cultivate in your house, and that stuff is actually toxic, even lethal in extreme cases. Your ceiling and walls will crumble away, your carpet will turn into a gross mush, your possessions will be ruined, your roof decking will sag, and the house will inevitably collapse.
At RGB Construction, we hate to see good houses lost to all this, so we’re firm believers in educating our customers about roofs. Some things are a given, such as damaged flashing, missing shingles, discoloration and so on. Others aren’t as well-known, chief among them being granule loss with asphalt shingles.
The 3-Tab Shingle
Your standard 3-Tab shingle is made of crushed rock and tar, a fiber polymer layer, and adhesives. Shingles are designed to overlap, providing mostly gapless water protection and repulsion of intense solar heat and UV.
There exist two basic classes of shingles, the other being architectural.
The Architectural Shingle
These are higher-end and tend to have more aesthetic versatility, but the big important point about them here is how they double or triple their components, being heavier, and more durable. Architectural shingles, which we expertly offer, will suffer granule loss much more slowly overall.
Why Granules?
What’s the purpose of a granulated surface on a shingle? Basically, it increases ruggedness against water, ice, snow and climate. It will absorb the sun’s energy more effectively during the day, and shed it at night, keeping your home at your desired temperature.
Granule Loss?
So, it’s pretty clear that granule loss is not a good thing. Why is this happening exactly? Did you buy bad shingles? In all honesty probably not; asphalt shingles naturally lose granularity over the course of their lifetime.
Granule loss is the leading instigator of roof replacements, as it’s the heaviest and most prevalent symptom of a very aged roof.
However, other things can cause this too, such as tremendous rains, hail, branches, strong wind storms, and exceptionally intense hot and sunny days.
Detecting Granule Loss
Now that you know it’s something normal, you can imagine repairing it isn’t going to be as costly or as much off a headache since you don’t have a whole roof of bad shingles (hopefully).
How do you check for this in the future, so you can always react quickly? The biggest tell will be in your gutters, where the granules will accumulate. The flow of water through gutters rarely moves them at much speed, so they tend to gather up and even clog gutters.
If you don’t have gutters because you live in a place where it seldom rains, you can climb up to your roof (don’t walk out on it), and look at your shingles. Ones that have lost their granules will be black, and look more like a uniform surface, compared to the lighter, visibly granulated shingles around them. They will often be misshapen as well.
Do I Need a Roof Replacement?
If you’re losing granules, as we said, it can be a common symptom of an aging roof. It all depends on how much loose granules you find, and how old your roof is. If it’s over 25, it’s probably time to replace your roof. If it’s under that age by a decent factor, then you may just be experiencing some shingles giving out that have been unlucky enough to be worn out faster.
Repairs are in order then. We can do either, fill out our contact form today!
