We home inspectors often talk about plumbers who take a bite out of beams, floor joists, you name it, down in basements and crawl spaces. They can solder, cut, glue and make drains run downhill, but they can be menaces to the structure they work on.

There is a similar menace on many roofs. I see this one a whole lot in this community. That menace is either an overzealous home owner or someone who works for one of these dish TV companies. These folks get up on the roof, about any place they please, and then they screw their dish fasteners onto the roof surface. In so doing, they put holes or penetrations right down into the roof and sheathing. Sometimes these are long bolts -- worse than a simple roofing nail.

On at least two inspections, when entering the attic, I found leaks around the fasteners at these dishes. Somebody needs to give dish installers a basic course in not wrecking roofs. It seems like, one of these days, some homeowner is going to get a good dose of attic mold, sue one of the installation companies, and the companies might start better training the installers. As for the homeowners who do their own work of that caliber, the more you do this job of inspecting, the more you realize that there is no hope of redemption for most of them. 

Thanks for stopping by,

Steven L. Smith

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