10 signs it’s time for a roof check

After a Nor'easter or high-wind event, missing shingles are the most obvious red flag. Once the black underlayment is exposed, your roof deck is one heavy rain away from taking on water — and interior damage starts fast.

New Jersey summers cook asphalt shingles. Over years, UV breaks down the asphalt binder — you'll see hairline splits, curled edges, or shingles that snap when flexed. Cracked shingles no longer seal to the layer below and start losing wind resistance.

You inherit whatever the last roofer did. Common install mistakes we still find: missing ice-and-water shield at eaves, exposed nail heads, wrong nail placement, poor valley detailing, and no starter strip. These roofs look fine for a year, then fail suddenly.

A typical asphalt shingle roof in North Jersey lasts 25–30 years. If yours was installed in the early 2000s or earlier, it's approaching end-of-life whether or not you see obvious damage yet — granules loosen, sealing strips fail, deck attachment weakens.

A fallen branch might not puncture through, but the impact will crack shingles, dent flashing, and dislodge the granule layer at the strike point. Damage often looks minor from the ground and is only visible from the roof itself.

Tree branches that rub against your roof act like slow-motion sandpaper — wearing off protective granules, snagging shingles loose, and shedding moisture-holding leaves into your gutters and valleys.

Ice dams form when heat escapes into the attic, melts snow at the ridge, and the runoff refreezes at the cold eaves. Trapped water backs up under shingles and into your walls. In North Jersey, this is almost always an attic insulation and ventilation problem — not just a roof problem.

The dark streaks are usually gloeocapsa algae; the fuzzy green patches are moss. Both hold moisture against the shingle surface, accelerate granule loss, and eventually pry shingle edges up as the moss root system grows.

Those coarse black or gray specks in your downspouts and gutters are the protective ceramic granules that keep sunlight off your shingles' asphalt base. A little post-install granule loss is normal; a lot — enough that the gutter looks like coarse sandpaper — means the shingles are wearing out.

By the time you see a stain inside the house, water has already been intruding for a while — usually through failed flashing around a chimney, skylight, plumbing vent, or valley. The leak point is rarely directly above the stain.