I was remembering working there in 1961/63 time frame. Don't know anything about the industry, know, but most consumer things are made by other than the company on the label. Always has been and always will be.
Malarkey made several types of shingles than the three-tab ones. Just changed the die roller in the shingle machine. One I remember was "Dutch lap". They were trapezoid in shape. No tabs. I think the whole shingle was a single color, not the "shadow" effect of the three-tab.
We used all different colors of granules. Came in hopper cars on the railroad.
If you have good insurance you've hit the jackpot as you may get most of the cost of a new roof paid for by the insurance. Wind took off a quarter of the roof, including most of the wood, on one of my rentals and messed up another quarter of the roof. The shingles were at end of life. Insurance paid for the entire reroofing job, even on the half that wasn't damaged.
With a roof at it's
All I can tell you is my experience. I just reroofed because I'm going to sell the house but the roof was water tight yet had lost most of the granules, i.e. probably only about 20% of them were still on the shingles on the sunny side. I've been fixing broken tabs as outlined on this roof for about 10 years. Had I done nothing when tabs started flying 10 years ago I would have had to reroof about 8 years ago. I probably could have gotten another 2 years out of it but buyers would not like it so I reroofed it.
The key thing there is you need to have replacement cost coverage. Otherwise they pay for the depreciated value of what was damaged, meaning if the roof was near it's end of life, you wouldn't get very much.
Also, how they handle it varies from one insurance company to another and the particular adjuster also factors in. I don't know how you can be sure how they will handle it, until it actually happens. I went through this with Allstate on a Sandy claim. I had replacement coverage, a roof near it's end of life. They treated each roof plane seperately. On each plane, only if there was extensive damage or if the shingles were so brittle that the plane could not be repaired, would they pay to replace that entire plane. The fact that it would look like hell, not match, etc, wasn't a factor they would consider. I wound up getting about half the cost of a new roof.
On the other hand, as you say, I have heard of insurance companies that have written off entire roofs if the total area that needs to be replaced reaches a large enough percentage.
How do you define water-tight? Long before water shows up on a ceiling, it can be making it's way into areas you can't see, ie the decking, soffits, fascia, etc.
If it doesn't stain the ceiling in a hard rain it's water tight. There's pretty much nothing between the underside of the roof and the ceiling but 4 inches of blown in insulation.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Water can start to destroy roof sheathing, fascia boards, even joists, before it shows up as a ceiling leak. For example, when I did my roof, I had some rotted fascia boards. Upon inspection, there were some tiny cracks in the old shingles just above it that let water drip onto it. If the leaks are small, then water starts to get into the wood and keep it wet. It starts to rot. And it can remain a small leak for a long time almost anywhere on the roof, without it making it through the insulation, through the drywall, etc to show up on your ceiling. You'd never see it, until you go to replace the roof. During that time, which could be years, the wood is kept wet and it starts to rot. The longer you push a roof that is at the end of it's life, the more probability of that happening.
The other risk is that in a bad storm with high winds, an old roof could have enough sudden shingle loss that you do have water damage. How far anyone wants to push their luck is entirely up to them.
Really? Come and look at the discoloration on the underside of my sheathing due to nail pops that lifted the tabs or broke through them. As far as I can tell, nothing below the sheathing or joists ever got wet, or if it did, it dried out before I felt any wetness on the insulation. It certainly never stained the ceiling. After I saw the discoloration, I went up in the attic during a storm and the underside of sheathing was wet in spots with no drips on to the insulation below.
In addition, surface tension can cause the water to run along a joist or sheathing and end up someplace hidden, like inside a wall.
When they replaced the roof all the old roof and underlayment was removed and there was no water damage except right at the very edge where it had dripped over the downcurled shingle edge an onto the fascia. That was easy enough to fix and was the result not so much of the roof being old per se but because when they reroofed it years ago they didn't use the metal edging they always use now so this kind of thing doesn't happen.
I'm certainly not saying your concerns aren't valid, only that it's not universal with an old roof. If you take pains to keep an eye on it and fix it immediately you can often get a lot more life out of a roof "that needs replacing" according to "experts".
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