Hi, I'm Tim Carter from AskTheBuilder.com, and you know what
Let's take a look at a third roof, and I think this one will be fascinating for you to look at
It's going to be a little tougher for you to figure out what to do in this case. Let's take a look right now
OK, look at this roof here. Yep, see all of these missing granules at the edges of these shingles
And you can see up above there, the shingles curled a little bit
Let's get a little closer here. You can actually see there, a nail head
And you can see missing granules, and you can also see right here, look at all the exposed felt paper
This is how the shingles are made. You can see it here
All along here, we've got exposed felt paper. Even here, right in the middle of this shingle right here, look at that
See, there's missing granules. OK, what do you think? Well, I'll tell you what
This is a 30-year shingle. It's rated for 30 years. It's a very heavy-duty laminated shingle, and when I say laminated
that's because, see right here? This is part of the shingle, but this tab is glued on top of this one
so this part here is actually two shingles thick. And then a cord could overlap the shingle here
This shingle down here actually goes way up underneath this one, so you have lots of roofing that's protecting the house
But this is a 30-year shingle, guaranteed. And it's only about 12 years old
So you're wondering, why are we seeing damage like this? Well, I'll tell you why
And look at this one. See all the felt paper on that one that's exposed
Well, this particular roof, it's in the northeast in New Hampshire. It gets a lot of snow and ice on here at the lower edge of the roof
and that's where we're at. We're down near the gutter line. You can see here is the gutter
And this is the missing granules were caused by ice damage. So this particular roof, especially if you look way up high on the roof
you really can't see from here, but you don't see any of that damage
The shingles up here look really, really good. And in my opinion, this roof here does not need to be replaced
Even though you're seeing damage like this, that doesn't mean that the roof is leaking
The only place that you might have a leak for it to happen is actually right here
where you see that exposed nail head. So this needs to have a little piece of flashing slit up underneath here that extends
a piece of metal that extends from here to here between my finger and my thumb
and it goes all the way up and it slides up about underneath here so that it fills this gap
And that way any water coming from down the roof will ride over the flashing
it won't have a chance to get to this nail, and then the water will exit right about here
So that's how you fix that nail. Don't try to put any roofing cement on top of that
That will just fall apart in a few years. It's that simple
All right, so there you have it. So that was a tough one. You can see that you just have to use a little bit of common sense
You have to know a little bit about shingles. But there are roofers that would come out here, I guarantee you
and tell this homeowner, oh, my goodness, you need a whole new roof
That would be thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, when, in fact, they really don't
So I hope this helped you, and I hope you're going to be able to diagnose whether or not you need a new roof
I'm Tim Carter for AsktheBuilder.com