What you need to know about the new asphalt shingle warranties before you decide what to have installed on your roof

There is a new wrinkle in shingle warranties that is going to change everything about the way you shop for shingles.

For decades when you found yourself looking at buying new roofing material, the default was asphalt shingles. What you had to decide was the brand of shingle, the style, the colour and what quality of shingle that you wanted to pay for. The quality of the shingle was determined by the amount of years they were warrantied. So cheap shingles were 10 or 15 year shingles and they went up in 5 or 10 year increments until you got to 40 year shingles that were considered premium.

The big shingle companies have changed there warranties starting this year, they have done away with year warranties on there shingles. They have gone to limited lifetime warranties on all of there shingles. This means that they will warranty the shingles and replacement of the shingles for about 10 to 15 years. After that they only replace the shingles, but you have to pay to have the old ones removed and the new ones installed. It's also a sliding scale on the value of your shingles, so if you spend $10,000.00 on a roof if they replace that amount of money in 15 years you will not get enough shingles to replace the shingles that you took off because of inflation.

It sounds like this system would cost the shingle companies more money because they would have to pay out money for the life time of the home they are installed on because the shingles will eventually fail. Here's the catch, the warranty on the shingles is not transferable if the home is sold. The average homeowner only lives in there homes for 7 years. So on average shingle companies now are banking on the percentages to only have to warranty there shingles for 7 years. That means that they have actually down graded there warranties to below the cheapest shingle they used to sell.

The shingle companies are now promoting this lifetime warranty as a plus and are even charging more for there shingles on average. So they have figured out a way to lesson there exposure with there warranties and raise there prices without giving the consumer anything extra.

So if you can afford it, you should look into other alternatives other then shingles.

There is an ever growing list of alternatives in roofing with the dissatisfaction of asphalt shingles. Also with the price of oil on the rise the gap between oil based asphalt shingles and all other non oil based roofing products is rapidly closing.

But if you have to buy shingles for your roof, go into the purchase with your eyes wide open.

If you want anymore information on shingles or other roofing products feel free to email me at robabbott@villagebuilders.ca

Rob Abbott

Operations Manager

Village Builders Inc.