If I’ve calculated correctly, we’ve replaced about 2/5ths of the shingles on the house, all on the lower part (the only lower part left is over the front porch and a tiny pop-out above the kitchen window). If my calculations are right, we’ve got about 55 of 85 bundles left to do to finish the house.
I can report this:
1. I have one finger that’s not really speaking to me at the moment. I managed to mash it at least once each day over the three days we spent doing shingles this weekend.
2. Of our three children, Liam and Lexie have swung hammers to put shingles in. Isaac came out on the roof for social purposes and moved some loose shingles around for us, but that’s about it.
3. Mother Nature saw us on Friday putting shingles up and decided we looked hot so brought over a rather intense thunderstorm (including new hail) and just sorta stalled it over us.
4. Houses need shingles because otherwise their roofs leak like sieves, as we discovered during said storm as the garage turned into a shower and the closet in the laundry room into a waterfall (fortunately a minor one).
5. My wife is a shingle-driving fiend, particularly when her laundry room is threatened with additional flooding.
6. The nifty little homemade ladder elevator I saw on YouTube, the one that featured the power winch I figured was optional, probably would have worked better if I hadn’t regarded the winch as optional. As it was, we slung the 30 bundles of shingles up on the house via the time-tested method of me humping the bundles into the back of the truck and handing the shingles four or so at a time to the kids, who stood on top of the truck box and flung the shingles onto the roof.
Good news is once we’d shingled the exposed roof and it rained again, there were no new leaks. I had certainly hoped that would be the case, but you never know. I’m always so optimistic in my pessimism.
So the bigger test comes later this week now, when the Blue Raven solar people come to remove the panels for us so we can re-shingle that portion of the house. They balked at first when we suggested they do the work for free, but after Michelle pointed out to them that their crew opted to put the system up under the following conditions that it was probably best to do the work for free:
1. It had snowed the previous night so they had to shovel the roof in order to do their work, thus making it harder to see any damage.
2. Their “roof inspector” guy never actually got up on the roof to look at the state of it.
3. We told them we’d had a hailstorm and they could see the damage to the siding, and knew our insurance adjustor hadn’t been by yet to inspect the house, yet opted to do the install anyway
4. They found one hole in the roof, straight through the waferboard, indicating again the roof might need repair.
5. When they suggested we cover the cost of the removal and reinstall with our homeowner’s insurance, we pointed out the panels hadn’t been up there at the time the damage occurred, so the insurance company was very likely to say “Nope. Ain’t gonna.”
I feel a little cheap about it all – but not cheap enough. There were enough error precursors there for their crew – which we were trusting to do things right – to say, “Yeah, we’d better wait until after the insurance adjustor takes a look first.” I should have done a lookie at the roof as well, but it’s very high.
Aside: As I posted about the shingle job on Facebook, a friend reminded me of this quote from MASH:
Hunnicautt (after talking with his father-in-law Floyd on the phone): Colic. Her intestines are blocked. We gotta keep her on her feet, so they won't twist. And we gotta clean her out. Lots and lots of warm water.
Hawkeye: I think I'll stroll up to the front to see how the shooting's going.
(Next scene)
Hawkeye: Hook this to the spigot up there.
Hunnicutt: It looks awful high.
Hawkeye: You want the other end?
Hunnicutt: It's not so high.
Bottom line is: If you’re going to have solar panels installed and you’re not sure what condition your roof is in, have it inspected professionally beforehand – don’t trust the solar installers to do the job.
On a positive note for Blue Raven, they’re willing to work with us (though we had to talk with three different people to make sure this was filed under “you’re fixing your own mistake,” and they did send someone out to see why our inverter kept shutting down, and seem to have fixed the problem.
We still haven’t seen an impact on our power bill, but this is only the first month after we got the system installed and running, and I’m not exactly sure how it all works. Next month’s bill will tell. And it had better, else Blue Raven will get yet another phone call from us. And likely Rocky Mountain Power will hear from us too. We’re crossing our fingers that once the removal and reinstall are done, it’s smooth sailing from here on out. And we’ll have a roof underneath that’ll more than match the expected lifespan of the panels.
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