Every roof I walk after a wind or hail event raises the same question in somebody's head before I am off the ladder: storm damage vs wear. The homeowner asks it standing in the driveway. The office asks it when the record lands. It is a fair question, and the most useful thing I can do about it up on the slope is not to answer it in one word. It is to show both things clearly enough that anyone looking at the record later can see what I saw.
Here is why. A one word answer does not travel. Six months on, "storm damage" in a note is a word somebody typed. Thirty seconds of video showing a soft circular bruise with the mat exposed, filmed two feet from a cracked and curling shingle, with my voice saying how each one feels under a thumb, is something anyone can follow on their own. Descriptions travel. Labels do not.
Storm damage vs wear: put them in the same frame
The mistake I made for years was documenting only the interesting part. Find a good bruise, shoot it tight, move on. That leaves a viewer with a close-up of a dark circle and nothing to measure it against. A nickel sized dark spot at four inches from the lens could be almost anything.
Now I frame both. Wide shot of the slope so you know where you are. Then a medium that gets the fresh mark and the old wear in one frame together. Then tight on each in turn. A bruise next to a blister. Fresh granule loss beside a bare patch that has been bare long enough to weather grey. Same slope, same light, same phone, one right after the other.
The comparison is the information. Somebody who has never been on a roof can see that those two spots are not the same kind of thing, without taking my adjectives on faith.
Describe the thing, not the category
The vocabulary matters more than people expect. I try to stay on statements a person could check against the picture:
- "Circular depression, about the size of a nickel. Granules displaced, mat is exposed and still black."
- "Soft under my thumb. It gives and comes back."
- "This shingle is curled at both corners and cracked along the tab line. No impact mark on it that I can see."
- "Ridge cap here has been resealed at some point. The sealant is hard and cracked."
Compare those with "hail hit here", "that is just age", "this one is storm related". Those are categories. A category in a record is a dead end. The person reading it later cannot check it against anything. They can only take my word.
There is more on the habit itself in describing what you see out loud, which is worth practicing on ordinary days and not just storm weeks.
Say out loud what you cannot tell
Inspectors skip this because it feels like admitting weakness. It is the opposite. The most credible line on any recording I have made is some version of "I cannot tell how old this is from up here."
Real ones, from real slopes:
- "There is no way for me to date this from the roof. What I can tell you is the mat is exposed and it has not weathered yet."
- "This crack, I do not know whether it was here last month. Nothing about it looks fresh to me."
- "That vent boot is split. Boots split from sun over years, so I would not call it new, but I am not going to guess at a year."
Say it while you are looking at the thing and it is in the record in your own voice, at the moment you were looking at it. That is worth more than a tidy note written in the truck that sounds more certain than you were.
Record the wear too
Storm weeks produce a lot of records that contain only the marks. A twelve year old roof with three fresh marks on it is not a roof with three things on it. It is a twelve year old roof, and the record should show that: granule cover across all the slopes, the curl on the south facing edges, the patch over the kitchen somebody did before you got there, the flashing that was already lifting.
Two practical reasons. First, a record that shows only the bad bits reads like it was assembled to make a point rather than to describe a roof, and it is worth less to everyone who looks at it, the homeowner included. Second, the ordinary wear is the baseline. Nobody can see what is different about the fresh marks unless what was already there is in the same recording, from the same walk.
Order and time do the rest
Walk the same order on every roof and the record gets its structure for free. North slope, east, south, west, then penetrations, then gutters, then the ground level shots of the elevations. Anyone following the video later knows where they are without being told.
The clock does the other half. A timestamped recording establishes when the observation was made, which is the one thing nobody can reconstruct from memory afterwards. That is a large part of why storm week records look different from routine ones, and the storm damage documentation pillar walks through the rest of it.
What this looks like with InspectStream
This all works on a phone and a notepad. It works better when the homeowner is watching it happen.
I text a link before I climb. They tap it and watch in their browser. No app, no account, and their camera is never requested, so nothing on their phone asks them for permission. When I say "I cannot tell how old this crack is," they hear me say it while looking at the crack, and if they want the other side of a vent I am still standing on the roof. The whole walk records on its own and the recording lands with the company instead of on my phone, so the side by side comparisons are still there in a year for the homeowner, the office, a future contractor, or anyone who asks. The viewer link stops working when I end the inspection, or after twelve hours, whichever comes first.
The mechanics from both sides are on the how it works page. Every plan has a 7-day free trial with no credit card, which during a storm week means you can try this on the roofs you were going to walk anyway.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.