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Kamloops, BC
An inspection is worth exactly what its report says. “It’s got a few years left” from the driveway cannot be compared, acted on, or handed to anyone else. Here is what a written report has to contain before it is any use to you.
Most roof inspections in this city end with a conversation on the driveway. Someone comes down the ladder, says the roof has a few years in it or that it is about done, and leaves. That is a useful thing to hear and it is not an inspection — because nothing survives the conversation.
The test is simple. An inspection has to produce something a third party can read. An insurer, a buyer, a strata council, a second roofer, or you in eighteen months when the same slope starts behaving differently. If nothing was written down, none of those readers exist, and the money bought an afternoon of reassurance rather than a position you can act from.
That is the standard the rest of this page is written against, and it is also what the other pages on this site send people here for. When documenting storm damage or identifying hail damage calls for an independent written assessment, this is the document it means.
The single most omitted item on a roof report is the one that governs everything else: what the inspector could actually see.
There is a real difference between a roof that was walked, a roof that was viewed from the top of a ladder at the eave, a roof photographed from the ground with a long lens, and a roof flown. Each gives a genuinely different level of confidence, and on a steep or frosted slope the safe answer may well be the limited one. That is fine. What is not fine is a report that does not say which it was.
The same goes for the parts that were skipped. A section under snow, an attic with no hatch, a low-slope return behind a dormer that could not be reached safely — each of those should appear in the report by name, with the reason. A report that lists what was not inspected is more trustworthy than one that appears to have seen everything, because the second kind is usually the first kind with the gaps left out.
Why this matters more than it sounds. An inspection report gets read months later by people who were not standing in the yard. Without the access note, a clean finding reads as “the roof is sound” when what it actually meant was “the half I could reach looked sound in October.”
Those are different statements, and the difference usually surfaces at the worst possible moment — during a sale, or during a claim.
A roof is not a single thing that is either good or bad. It is an assembly, and the parts fail on completely different schedules. A report that resolves all of it into one adjective has thrown away the information you were paying for.
What a usable report separates out:
On remaining service life, the honest form is a range with the observations behind it. A range you can argue with is worth more than a confident number you cannot check, and the number on its own tends to describe how the roof looked on one dry afternoon.
When an insurance claim is in play, the word attached to the report is usually independent, and it is worth knowing what it is doing there.
It means the description of the roof’s condition was authored separately from the party who stands to be paid for repairing it. That is the whole of it. It does not mean the inspector is certified by anyone in particular, and it does not make the report a scope of works — an assessment says what is there and why it is in that state; a scope says what will be done about it and for how much. Two documents, two jobs.
In practice the roofer who inspects is often the roofer who would do the work, which is not disqualifying and is frequently unavoidable — the people who know roofs are the people who fix them. What matters is that the report discloses it. An inspector with an interest in the findings who says so plainly is a more useful witness than one who leaves it to be worked out later.
How that report then gets used in a claim — fixing the event date, building the file, what the adjuster is doing with it — is a separate process, set out on the storm damage page.
There is one case in Kamloops where an inspection stops being advisory and starts being the document everything else is built on: damage from fire or flood.
Once Kamloops Fire Rescue or an engineer has investigated, the inspection that establishes the repair scope is arranged privately, and what it produces is what gets permitted and priced afterwards. The emergency roof repair page sets out that sequence and who arranges which step. The consequence for the report itself is the part that belongs here.
A report written to define a scope has a harder job than one written to advise an owner. Somebody who was never on site — a plan reviewer, an adjuster, a restoration contractor — has to be able to build a specification from it without guessing. That means extents described in measurements rather than impressions, damaged assemblies distinguished from undamaged ones by boundary rather than by adjective, and the pre-existing condition of the roof recorded alongside the new damage, since that distinction is exactly what will be argued about later.
If your inspection is going to end up in that pile, say so when you book it. The document that gets written is not the same one.
There is a local reason the component-by-component discipline above matters more here than it would on the coast, and it is worth a roofer knowing you know it.
Kamloops sits in a continental semi-arid climate where the dominant pressure on asphalt shingle is ultraviolet exposure rather than moisture — the mechanism is set out in detail on the roof repair page. The consequence for an inspection is specific: sun exposure is not distributed evenly over a roof. South and west-facing slopes take the load. North-facing ones do not.
So the normal condition of a mature roof in this city is asymmetric. One plane brittle and shedding, another on the same building with real life left in it. A report that averages that into a single verdict is wrong in both directions at once — it overstates the good slope and understates the bad one, and it takes the most useful finding on the roof and deletes it.
That finding is often worth money. An asymmetric roof is the case where a targeted repair is the right answer rather than a full replacement — but only if somebody wrote down which slope was which. Ask for the report by plane. It is a reasonable request and the answer tells you a lot about how the inspection was done.
One thing an inspection is not is a leak diagnosis. If water is already coming through, the work is tracing the entry point, which follows a different method entirely — see roof leak repair.
Tell us what prompted it and we’ll pass it to a local Kamloops roofer. Say if you need it in writing.
At minimum: the date and the conditions on the day, how the roof was accessed and which parts could not be reached, the condition of each component rather than one verdict for the whole roof, photographs identified by location, remaining service life given as a range with the reasoning behind it, and a separation of what needs doing now from what is being monitored. A report without the access limits in it cannot be relied on.
A quote visit is scoped to price a job that is already assumed. An inspection is scoped to establish condition, including the finding that nothing needs doing yet. The two often involve the same person on the same ladder, but they produce different documents and answer different questions, so it is worth saying which one you are asking for when you book.
Yes, and the value of it is that it is authored separately from the party who would carry out the repair. An assessment describes what is there and why it is in that condition; it is not a scope of works and not a price. If a claim is involved, the report is one document in a larger file and it is strongest when it was written before any repair was carried out.
It is common and not automatically a problem, since the people who know roofs are the people who fix them. What matters is that the report says so. An inspector who will also be bidding the resulting work has an interest in the findings, and a report that states this plainly is more trustworthy than one that leaves it to be discovered later.
There is no code requirement for a residential roof inspection, so the useful triggers are events and transitions rather than a calendar interval. After any significant weather event, before buying or selling, when a roof approaches the age where its sun-facing slopes begin diverging from its shaded ones, and before committing to a replacement you are not yet certain is needed.
It is an estimate, and it is only useful when the reasoning is attached. A range supported by observations, such as granule cover, mat flexibility and the condition of the flashings, can be argued with and checked. A bare number with nothing behind it cannot be, and it tends to reflect what the roof looked like on one dry afternoon.