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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

The Coming Wind Storm and Over Driven Nails (Roofing Nail Guns)


It's coming. The big one. And all those nail gunned roofs put on this hot summer are in peril. As previously harped upon, the roofing gets very soft when it is new. Asphalt is a frozen liquid. The natural state is liquid but the temperature is a little too low for it to run. But the softening point has been met.


As the Linda Richmond used to say on SNL's Coffee Talk. "like butter."

Remember how your bicycle tires used to pick up the fresh road asphalt and then the rocks? The softening is almost as bad on a roof. The road asphalt is of a little higher quality because it has to take more of a pounding but the basic long chain carbon molecule is the same. The fillers, a word that does not mean what you think it does, are different. But the newer the roof, the softer the asphalt.

Now here comes the driver blade of a roofing nail gun. And all the force is put into the nail and is not stopped by the roofing surrounding it like a hatchet is. What do you want to guess? 200 mph? 300? How about 1400 feet per second. Yee haw mama! Try 954.52 mph. That's the speed of an FFAR 5" Rocket. And the AGM-114 Hellfire. Actually the nail is going 4.52 mph faster than either rocket.

This takes the work out of nailing, the part that keeps the roofing attached to the house. Don't you think that is important? Why do the manufacturers, ARMA, and the NRCA allow pneumatic nailing? Because they put in the caveats about over-driving or driving at an angle, symptoms not possible with a hatchet.

And Holy Moses, try blowing on a roof when it's cold. Crack! No brainer.

Now go measure the thickness of the new roofing on your home. Look to see how over driven the nails are. Just 1/64th of an inch and you are counting on the self seal to keep the roof on until the Great Blow arrives.

And it will. Again. Just like it always does even though it does not always hail. And where a hail damaged roof might not leak, the wind ravaged covering on your home, that protects everything you own, will, especially if the carpetbagger reused the felt, added new felt but didn't install it according to the manufacturer's specs, or just did a shabby job because he thinks the felt is just a temporary covering. If it is then why do the manufacturers ask that the felt goes over the eave metal edge, under the rake metal edge, offer different grades of deck protection, and offer different grades of leak protection (peel and stick).

I stumbled upon this roofing vocabulary list I thought you might enjoy.
Roofing Glossary





Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
    Follow jwrightroofing on Twitter

Saturday, July 16, 2011

The Important Parts of A Roof: Ventilation and Warranty

The two top issues with roofs are ventilation and warranty. Without minimum balanced ventilation you have no warranty and without certification your roof has a prorated material only warranty. That deductible might seem like a big hill right now but when you go to sell your home in ten years and the home inspector fails the roof  because you used cheap shingles like Atlas or Malarkey, or you failed to meet the 300 Rule of Balanced Ventilation, you might be surprised to find yourself coughing up over $10,000.00 of your equity to roof the home to complete the selling processes.

If you don't meet the intake and exhaust requirements, don't place the vents properly ( most aren't), your minimum and limited material warranty is void. If you followed the 300 Rule, you'll have a good prorated material only warranty. If you use a Master Elite Roofer or a Shingle Master Roofer and follow the 300 Rule of Ventilation and use the appropriate accessories, you'll have a 100% material and labor warranty for up to fifty years.

If the roofer isn't certified , your warranty is compromised.
If the ventilation is not balanced according to the minimum rules of ventilation, you not only do not have any warranty, your roof will fail early. So will your HVAC, paint, health, insulation, and deck.

Man it is hot out there. One customer was telling me how the shingles burnt his hand. Because the shingles are now thinner than ever, and still hot, the ventilation has become much more important. The roofing is hot, there is less asphalt, the warranties have been upgraded to fifty years pretty much across the board, but the caveats discrediting the warranties have increased. 

Application of the roof, ventilation, system components, and accreditation have all come into play to keep these pronouncements of better warranties in play.

Don't let these caveats come back to burn you. Follow the rules and you'll have a great money saving roof. Don't follow the rules and your last child might only go to junior college rather than that wonderful college your other kids went to. And they'll end sentences in prepositions too.



Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
    Follow jwrightroofing on Twitter

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Roofer Irving and Search Engines, Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Coming up in search engines is important for roofers today, especially in places like the 75062, 75063, and 75035 areas of Irving that have a lot of hail damage. Homeowners sometimes want to use local roofing companies and use key words like "Irving Roofer" or "Irving Roofing Company" when they search Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Bing.

"Hello, I'm an Irving Roofer (with an 817 area code.)
"Howdy neighbor, I'm a local roofer from Irving." Response: "Can I come see your warehouse? Roofers with roofing companies have roofing warehouses for their roofing materials don't they?"
"I've been in business in Irving for years as a roofer." Response: "Then you have roof customers here going back years if you are an Irving roofer?"

Yahoo search and Google search, are just starting points. Ask to see the dude's drivers license, insurance and registration. Roofers are registered with the city. References? Certifications? Bank checks (lists address)? If you catch him in a lie, tell him to come back later for a deposit check and don't be there.

The other day I looked and we weren't on the top of Google anymore so I made a few changes to the website and bang, we were back on top of the maps. We stayed in the organic search but fell in the little box at the top with the maps. You know, the A, B, C ,D..where the map search comes up with businesses..

I noticed that a lot of new companies were showing up in Irving as well as some companies that weren't from Irving. So I went over to Yahoo and we were no where to be found. I've tried to make us come up and had a little success but who cares about being number 25 on a map list. No one will see you but your grandmother. She'll thinks it's fantastic.

Here's the point. Many companies post false comments about themselves. We never did that. Dig down into the comments on the Google Homepage and look to see if the verbage is similar, the dates are clumped, the people who left the comments never left another anywhere, or so on. Dig. Then they lie about their location. We did it through vagueness and got punished but we did it in an era that let it go. After our flogging at the Great Hall of Google, we are submissive little puppies doing everything right. Those sins we committed were a long time ago and stood the test of time, or the test up until the rules changed. We just listed the company by name and city without more than a comma for a physical address in many towns. This was not a sin then but the rules changed.. Pronouncements came out that monkey business was to be stopped but we wanted our cheese and didn't think much about it.

I will admit the timing of their punishment was bad for us but our penance having been completed we are now good denizens of the e-verse.

But in times like these when roofers are all over Irving crushing the life from doorbells, how can a pleb that lives under a holy roof be assured that the knock on the door, or the Yahoo or Google search, has produced a legitimate bearer of roofing talents.

He can't. He never could. Being local just means it will be easier to bother him in person rather than having papers served far away.

If there are false comments on Google, Yahoo, etc., many complaints at the BBB (even answered resulting in an A rating), bad comments on Google, Yahoo, City Search, Yelp, Yellowbot, or they have no certifications, then you are probably dancing with a minor evil deity. If all the comments are clumped date wise or are all recent, you do the math.

Having been certified with GAF and Certainteed means a lot for our customers but the best of bests for consumer protection, at least at this stage in human development is Angie's List. Otherwise just put the roof on yourself. Don't use a door knocker.

This is the worst blog I ever wrote.

Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
    Follow jwrightroofing on Twitter

Saturday, July 9, 2011

The Difference Between a Roofing Company and a Roofing Contractor

The differences between a company and a contractor are pretty important and a lot of it boils down to customer service. Companies do some contracting but they usually have their own staff and employees for sales, warranty work, supervision, and other administrative duties.
 Contractors sell jobs and have subcontractors do all their work. They usually have no staff to watch their jobs and perform all the supervision themselves. If the contractor has a lot of leads then his jobs go unsupervised.

With the recent hails storms all over north Texas, all established companies have lots of leads. The contractors are out canvassing door to door because nobody knows them. Now they have to find help because they will get some jobs. The comes the rub. With strangers on their roofs and more doors to knock, they usually let the job take its own course.

Time will tell, if the next wind storm doesn't, whether the contractor was good or bad and just like every time a storm comes through town, the people of Irving will find out if they had a roofing company or a roofing contractor. Those with companies with roots planted in the community will be there to service their roofing customers while those that had contractors will be lucky to find them.

Even though companies do some contracting, they have an infrastructure to handle situations as they become more or lass difficult.

After you've done your research on your roofer, you might want to visit his office. If he has no warehouse or equipment, then your suspicions should rise. Check with Angie's List, the BBB, the city building inspectors office, old customers, Complaints Board and other social sites, but don't just listen to the fast talker.

Does the roofing company have insurance? Are they certified in the product you're installing? Check with the roofing manufacturer.

With so called roofers canvassing Irving, Coppell, Carrollton, Farmers Branch, Lantana, Prosper, Dallas, and other towns, the good installers are pretty occupied. Best to take your time and get a good job.

Also make sure you get the enhanced warranty that covers material and labor for 50 years rather than the prorated material only warranty. When you go to sell your house it could save you a fortune,
Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
    Follow jwrightroofing on Twitter

Friday, July 8, 2011

The History of Class IV Roofing, UL 2218

Just how did we get here and where are we going on impact resistant roofing? I was there, in the field, not in the lab, and have watched the changes, so here we go:

Before, back in the day(I hate that saying), the ways roofing were made more hail resistant, also known as impact resistant, was to make sure you had a firm deck, proper ventilation, and, if you were lucky, had a steep roof.

The angle of a steep roof allows for deflection on large straight falling stones or one side damage on somewhat vertically zooming stones. But the roofers are lucky because they risk their health and lives when installing roofs on high pitches.

Insurance Companies Want To Increase Profits

Most of the greatest single losses by insurance carriers are hurricanes. They even get names, unlike hailstorms. But the hailstorm is the mass of losses as there are so many every year and the insurance carriers have accountants that see this. So after the 1995 storm, that surpassed the mother of all hailstorms in 1992, we had to change the name of 1992's storm to "that other storm that caused shortages of materials." 1995 became "the big one." We couldn't call them Charlie or Bob so we used phrases like ooh and awe.

But the losses were great and the mother of all insurance companies, State Farm, was pissed. If we speak internationally the mother is Lloyd's, the step grandmother of State Farm. Now I get serious.

People noticed that the SBS modified bitumen flat roofs held up pretty good against hail despite there relatively thin design. The great minds at SFI began to swirl and bob and someone shouted "we can exchange discounts if people will spend more money on roofs that won't come back to bite us in the rear.

Ha ha ha! Just like Texas tried to save energy with dual glazed glass statutes for windows, the evil manufacturers jumped up to ruin a great deal for the consumer. Do you really think a builder would put in a decent window on a $50,000.00 home. He won't even do it on a $5 million dollar one. So the energy efficient window fails in a few years and now you have a fogged non energy efficient window that makes your house look like doo doo until you have to pay to have it fixed when you sell it. Now the new buyer has a repaired cheap builder grade window. 

Similar happenings happened with roofing. The great culprits, Atlas and Malarkey, who never easily pay out a warranty claim, started making class 4 garbage. If I stumble across one of them that is over seven years of age that has not blistered, I think something is wrong with the product. I learned this in 1980 in the great organic shingle failure wars when Atlas and Masonite (another member of the crappy product lobby, although their namesake was a historical class action suit they now make awesome products) used to sell their factory back and forth and constantly claim the product was made by the other.

So these dogs come in and make a product that will withstand the dropped ball test when new, but not when exposed to the sun for a little while. That is why many insurers are getting away from the class 4 discount program.

If I haven't lost you yet I'll get back to some very interesting history:

State Farm invented a hail gun and started shooting man made hail, otherwise known as ice, at roofing products. Boy wouldn't have like to have seen the parties if they had done that in the eighties. Corporate drinking was phased out in the 1990's by the accountants because they can't hold their liquor. 

But State Farm needed a standardized test so they hired the experts, the Underwriters Laboratories. The white frocks of SFI and UL began their research hand in hand. somewhere after the "Mother of All Hailstorms" in 1995. They took steel balls, and not the Italian iron balls concept, of various sizes at different altitudes, and dropped them on different roofing products. After having gathered the data in a legitimate fashion by paying UL, the standardized testing agent everyone respects, State Farm went to the Insurance Board, which is staffed with insurance execs, and started the process of passing mandatory discounts for impact resistant roofs.


Caveats were laid out like that after January I, 1999, each and every shingle has to be individually stamped with its class 4 rating and manufacture date. Also appearance allowance disclaimers were written in but the homeowner had to sign a form to get his discount. I don't want the cheese anymore, I just want out of the trap.

So by giving back large discounts on premiums the insurers hoped to cut their losses. And they did at first. But the evil roofing manufacturers products started failing and some insurers wanted to give back the cheese too.


A few insurers like State Farm, USAA, Met Life, still push the non-mandatory discount program but Farmers and Allstate have opted out. Farmers has gone to a quality and newness discount program that incrementally raises your rates.


I believe that the products made by GAF and Cetainteed, as well as Gerard, will continue to hold up. We've had several calls here in Irving this year on Decra roofs that have been totaled but none on Gerard. Aluminum roofs fail under any circumstances. So does copper.


Never forget that proper ventilation is the best tool to keep you roof newer and better resistant to the forces of nature. If your roofer does not comprehend the minimum ventilation rule, the 300 Rule of Balanced Ventilation, then he's not much of a roofer. If he doesn't inspect your soffit vents then he doesn't care.


As James Burke said, "the only constant is change," we'll see what the future brings in the roofing industry. I expect it will be more synthetic materials that fail, as that seems to have been a constant for the last 25 years.


I recommend you stick to composition, steel, or even fire resistant number one perfection class 4wood shingles and class 3 shakes.
.  

Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
    Follow jwrightroofing on Twitter

Monday, July 4, 2011

The Roofs of Our Founding Fathers

When I read the other day that 2/3rds of our children do not know the three branches of government, I wondered if they knew what the 4th of July was all about: the right to build the roof of your choice without some regent telling you no.

Thomas Jefferson, my favorite American Revolutionary, flirted with sheet iron, pine shingles (although they were too expensive for the cost conscious tax revolting hero), and some interesting "Zig Zag" structure design made out of short planks mitered together rendering rafters unnecessary for his great dome on Monticello. He got the idea from his stay in France. Later he was enamored with tin and fortified his dome with a "hundred year roof." When he went with tiles, the cheapest product of his day, also weighing about the same as slate, he lost his boast of his roof not leaking. Tile roofs leak. They need underlayments.I could have told him that. He was just a professed amateur at building.

Jefferson's verbal sparing partner, John Adams, the Bush of his day as his son became president too, had a great roof quote about the White House he made on his second day there. I cannot resist: 
"Before I end my letter, I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."
 
While Jefferson mastered many talents, Adams was the political philosopher, like me. Yet I fail to find anything on his roofs. Thus I'll tell you the best part of the story of these two men's entwined lives:
Adams retired to his farm in Quincy. Here he penned his elaborate letters to Thomas Jefferson. Here on July 4, 1826, he whispered his last words: "Thomas Jefferson survives." But Jefferson had died at Monticello a few hours earlier.
I lifted these quotes from a government website but was already aware. Here's where to go
http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/johnadams 
 
I did find some pics of Adam's house and the first ones appeared to have wood shingles and the more elegant one later in life had slate.

Now for good old George Washington. This was copied from a site on Mount Vernon:
Hand Riving Shingles
Although the shingles currently on the roof are not original to the house (wooden shingles, depending on the type of wood, have a 25 to 50 year lifespan), they are the same shape, size and material as the ones George Washington used. It was through research and physical evidence that the roofs original appearance (and paint color) was discovered.
The roof you see today was installed in 1994 and uses over 60,000 hand rived cypress shingles. A froe is used to split the thin shingles off of a larger block of cypress. After the shingles are removed from the block they are then rounded with a saw to give the "fish scale" appearance to the roof that George Washington liked so much.

Love that hand rive.

You really need to thank these men because they;re the reason you get today off. They risked their considerable fortunes for an idea, that you could be free. And you are and will continue to be as long as you read your history and keep up with how many branches of government we have. Because if that changes we've got a real problem.

God Bless America!




Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
    Follow jwrightroofing on Twitter

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Angie's List , the BBB, Google Comments, and Roofers

For years the Better Business Bureau has been a trusted source for checking out a business. People may put in a complaint and the company has to respond. If no response is made, even if their is only one complaint, the company gets the dreaded "F."

Rarely do you see "B" or any other rating besides "A" or "F." Some companies have forty complaints and still have an "A" and that might be legit if the company is a behemoth. Rarely is that the case. The fish rots from the head down.

One crooked roofer had an "F" in Fort Worth so he opened a listing in the Dallas BBB and had an "A" even though he was using the same website and phone. His address was a post office box. Whoopee! Pays some dues for protection money and learn to write a reasonable response and you can continue on your murderous ways forever. Even BBB employees have voiced their disdain for some of these brutes to me personally.

Angie's List works differently. The customer writes a review on his experience with the company and rates the personnel on their:
Overall A
Price A
Quality A
Responsiveness A
Punctuality A
Professionalism A



That came from our last review. Yeah! Or was it our last ten? Anyway there is the constant threat of retribution. But the customer may write a review that cannot be forced down like the BBB does. The company may write a response but the review stands. 

Angie's List allows for an ongoing forum on a company's performance before a jury of it's peers, no clients. No going back. What is done is done so don't join if you can't consistently perform in a professional way. 

We were honored to win the Super Service Award last year and hope to again but that might be hard to do a repeat or three-peat.

In response to the BBB's minimal policing of business this Angie's List thing is growing madly. It's not for everyone but it does seam to add the best level of security one could expect to find in this era of false self posted Google Reviews along with the other sites like Kudzu and City Place.

Try goggling "Irving Roofer." Look at the second guy on the maps and try to find out how an Irving roofer has an *!& area code. Look at the poorly written reviews all done within a short period of time: March 3, April 1, May 12 and 23, and June 6 , 9, 10, 12. Only one has written more than one review and he did it the same day he wrote the one on this company.

The last rating , done June 21,was bad with no write up. That guy, if you look at his twenty reviews, writes about roofers lying on their reviews but seems to have written well about roofers in several states. Is it blackmail? Look at Eclat and all his paid reviews. What a joke. Pepper alone has written 72 reviews all over Kingdom Come.

These kinds of issues have fueled Angie's List. 



Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
    Follow jwrightroofing on Twitter

Friday, July 1, 2011

Irving Hail Storm Update

With the recent hailstorms in Lantana and other suburbs, the parade of roofers has been diluted. Besides there have been storms in Kansas and Colorado and the wimpier roofers have fled north for cooler climes.

Still the bad work has begun. One realtor in Plano kicked her roofer off the job and had us dry in her roof that they had left open all night. She had to use another roofer because our crews are behind a week to two weeks. We'd be further behind but some materials are not available.

Another house had no starter shingle and the nails were placed high on the shingles. When the wind blew it looked like a flag parade. I wonder if we should stop selling better starter shingles and just advertise that we use starter. Start bad, finish bad.

No felt, no metal in the valleys, nail guns, no certification, weak decking, all the ten commandments of roofing are being broken. No wonder it's so hot around here.

At least I get to hear from people I haven't spoken to in over twenty years. One sent me a copy of a contract we signed October 20th, 1980. I was a kid fresh out of college and loved working in the sun, getting tan, staying trim and healthy. Now this old man with a belly hopes he doesn't get skin cancer. I feel like Red in the "Shawshank Redemption"

Red: There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then, a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It's just a bullshingle word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shingle. 
  Well, it's not that bad but who knows. Now I struggle not to burn my palms when I get on the roof.

The best advice I can give to anyone right now is to chill out and get an extension on their claim. Some companies are only giving six months, and not the traditional year, without an extension. Then you lose your recoverable depreciation.

And you trust the insurance company more that the guy you want to put on your roof. They told you not to show your insurance papers to the roofer because they don't want him to show you all the money they left off the claim. besides they won't pay for leaks from bad workmanship or small wind damage claims. Deductibles are very high. So if you don't trust the roofer, why are you using him? Do you think you're a better roofing consultant? Can you use Xactamate to figure a full roof?

Good luck.



Jon Alan Wright
Jon Wright Roofing, Siding, and Windows
1915 Peters Rd., Suite 310
Irving, TX 75061
972.251.1818 Office
214.718.3748 Cell
972.554.8090 Fax
    Follow jwrightroofing on Twitter