BLOG- What's Up With Roofing Material Warranties?

If I may Digress a bit here from tinner.

I deal mostly in asphalt shingles and I have a different opinion. I agree about the whole nonsense about the underlayments, but that is beside my point. (We tore off a 2 layer yesterday, no underlayments. Plywood in A-1 shape.....)

Do I recommend the Non Pro Rated shingle Warranties? YES! I have seen many shingle failures which were covered under warranties that paid pennies on the dollar. I've replaced too many of my own roofs. Would I buy the warranty for my house? YES....and I did!

The BS that people are believing now falls into 2 categories: 1)That the 10 yr "Lifetime" warranties are "Lifetime" 2) Why buy a "warranty" .....The Insurance Company will buy me a new roof anyway. OK #2 is NOT BS

Utter'n dat, whaddoUwannaNo?

Here's a relevant article.

Here's an article about underlay.

The execs at a major shingle manufacturer felt they needed to increase sales somehow. Memos were sent to all departments in search of ideas. Some months went by and a fellow in marketing wanted to present an idea. A couple, really. He met with the execs one day and said “Let’s sell felt. The only people in the market are Bird and JM.” The execs all spoke up and said their entire market share there was new construction! “Only builders buy the felt to keep their projects dry until the roofers come and install the shingles. The roofers are often installing our shingles without felt. And it can’t be used on a re roof. What the heck do we want to sell felt for? The only felt we need is the 12” rag for our shingles. There will never be a need or market for us there. It could open us up to some new liability! And it isn‘t used under tin! Follansbee will void their warranty if they find felt under tin. We can‘t sell it there. There isn’t a roof in the world that requires felt…. How are you planning on selling THAT?” Get out of here with that hair-brained scheme!” “Please! Just give me a minute and you’ll see the logic! Please!” “You have 10 minutes.” “Here’s the deal. Our 15 year shingles regularly last 17-22 years minimum. And our 5 year warranty never needs to be honored, right?” Nods, and “yeses” from the execs. ‘So?” “ We will need to market ourselves as a leader to be envied. Let’s offer a ’7 year’ warranty ’if’ installers use our felt under our shingles! It’s a win-win. The shingles will go the term with or without the felt, but we can open up a whole new market and give glossy brochures to dealers to hand to installers and it only costs us pennies. The installers will do our marketing for us! We’ll always be able to ‘prove’ installation error if any warranty issues ever occur anyway. We can’t lose….It‘s a win-win and we get a larger market share all around.” “Research is showing that anybody less than 50 year old gets caught up in the hype that glossy brochures, TV ads, and radio ads spout. Any glossy ads we print will be taken as gospel. And it’s real easy to brainwash people if we were to do TV ads. Ignorant people soak them up like sponges! Older people tend to take ads with a grain of salt and figure that if it‘s worth being on TV, it‘ll be announced during the news as a news item. They seem to know the difference.” “The established and older roofers will never fall for that line.., but we could give it a try for a limited period of time. It’s your job on the line though!” “No problem Boss. We’ve been looking hard into this and we believe some hard pressed companies will use the ploy to increase their sales. And the newcomers to the roofing industry won’t know any better anyway. We won’t tool up for this, we’ll order from other makers and have our names stamped on the rolls. If this takes off, we’ll see about tooling up to make it ourselves, maybe. Who knows for sure. I do believe we can even make a market for it in the metal roofing side of things. Bill, Bob, myself a couple of others are looking into now.” “Joe and a small team are working on their own time to see if they can come up with some form of sticky felt. They heard a rumor that a company is working on a product that can be used on eaves to help with ice-dam issues. If it’s as good as rumor has it, even jacklegs will be able to do roofs with too many leaks further helping us avoid nay warranty issues. If it has merit, we we can come up with a marketing gimmick for it too.” “Just think ‘underlay’ and we’ll market the term and use it all the time until people start forgetting the roof itself and the underlay becomes the priority. Like I mentioned before, there is plenty up sell potential here and no liability beyond the pennies on the dollar we’re already liable for anyway. How can we lose?” “OK, we’ll also have legal look into all facets before anything goes public! One slip and you’re fired!” “Remember, this will have nothing to do with roof performance, it’s all about marketing! ”The New buzzword will be ‘Underlay!’ We will be working on selling an underlay for other standard systems like EPDM,TPO, and the like. It’ll be a harder sell, but if they’ll buy the one idea, I believe that in time we can sell them the other.”

When I sold a roof, I would always sell them as if there is no warranty, I based my recommondation on how well the shingle performed previous years.