What are the best roofing nails?

There are a lot of different roofing nails out there, and after all, nails are one of the, if not the most important part of a roof, holding everything together. Different nailsare used  for different applications, different materials. It’s very important to understand, and know, which roofing nail applies to your roof and install, which roofing nail might not apply for your situation and why that is.

One big thing that we see time and time again is roof repairs having to do with nail issues, for example, nail pops, where a nail is being extruded through plywood due to either the expansion and contraction of the roof, moisture in the attic space in proper nailing or a whole bunch of other issues. And those little nail pops allow water to come in and become a huge problem as far as costly repairs and maintenance that really shouldn’t be the case.

Common causes of roofing issues, related to nails

• In proper installation (over driven nails, not installed flush to the shingle, installed at incorrect angles)
• The attic space is not properly ventilated causing the moisture to build up and the

• wood expands and starts to back the nails out.

• Hot dipped electro galvanized roofing nails were not used and as a result the nails start to rust out and fail.
• Under driven nail

This is a very standard inch and a quarter hot dipped galvanized roofing nail. As you can see, they’re smooth. These are installed on probably 99% of asphalt roofs in north America. They get shot through the plywood, through the under layment, through the shingle, and the nail must hold in the roof. As you can imagine, after a while, there’s nothing really gripping into that wood. They start to get expelled and pushed out.

This is a GRIPX hot dipped galvanized inch and a quarter roofing nail. What these do, these have little ring shanks on the side, what happens is whereas the standard nail will start to get pushed out of the plywood, these will grip into the plywood, so really anchoring themselves. These are part of our GRIPX roofing warrantees, so these are getting installed in our GRIPX and GRIPX Pro roof lines, both of which are covered up to 25 years warranty. That includes any problems that you’re going to have with the nails, if the hot dipped galvanization process wasn’t done right, we’ll cover that as well as any nail pops.

So, in closing it is important to make sure that you understand and ask whoever’s doing your roof what the warranty is, “What kind of nails do you use.” If they just say standard roofing nail, well, that’s not acceptable. You need to know what’s going on your roof. “Is that covered under warranty? What happens if I have a nail pop?”

So, ask these questions. If you have any questions to ask us, please feel free to leave a comment. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Happy roofing!