LESLIE: James in Rhode Island finds The Money Pit on WPRO and you’ve got a roofing question. What can we do for you?
JAMES: My question is I’ve got a five-year-old house – brand new, obviously – and recently I had some roof shingles blow off with a mild windstorm that we had. It happened twice. And I’m thinking is that – it’s not normal for that to happen on such a young house. So I figured that either improper installation or a defect in the materials and I was wondering if there are any other possible causes that could create roof shingles flying off.
LESLIE: Well, it could be two things. It could be that they weren’t attached properly or they weren’t using the right adhesive to sort of help them attach or that they’re not the right shingles for your location maybe.
TOM: Yeah, you know, there’s a nailing guide on the bag of every shingles or on the package of every shingles. And generally it’s four nails per shingle. So the first thing I would check to make sure they’re nailed correctly. The second thing is, James, that there are different kinds of roofing shingles and some are meant for high wind areas. So if you happen to have an area where you’re picking up a lot of wind, you might have been better off using a different shingles. There are actually shingles out there that can stand up to 100-mile-an-hour wind storms.
JAMES: Well, I’m in an area where all the homes are new and a couple of homes also lost some shingles but not a whole lot of them, so – but the same shingles were supposedly used on all the homes in the whole neighborhood.
TOM: Well, and they probably were. And they probably were made very similarly. There’s another possibility and that is that sometimes when a roof is shingled in cooler weather the shingles don’t really have a chance to set because they don’t get enough sun right off. And so the glue …
LESLIE: Yeah, because the sun sort of helps adhere them to each other.
TOM: Yeah, because there’s like a glue strip between each layer of shingles and it takes a lot of heat of the sun to actually make that stick. So sometimes I’ve seen roof shingles blow off a lot when the roof was put on in the cooler weather.
JAMES: Is there a strip you’re supposed to peel off of that?
TOM: No.
JAMES: No.
TOM: No.
JAMES: Oh, OK. Because I saw the glue strip on it and there’s like a film over it. I thought maybe they should pull that away and then put it onto the roof and nail it.
TOM: There’d be no reason to do that. Yeah.
So, James, what I would suggest is that for right now you simply keep replacing those shingles and when you do you want to put a little tab of glue, little tab of roof cement, under each edge of a shingle before you put it down.
JAMES: OK.
TOM: Alright?
JAMES: Thank you.
TOM: You’re very welcome.
LESLIE: Enjoy your new house.
JAMES: Thank you.
TOM: Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.
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