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Find the leak

Five questions about when the water appears, where it shows up and what the attic looks like. You will get back the causes your answers are consistent with and why, what to stop doing, and the one check that would settle it.

Nothing in this tool asks you to get on the roof, and nor will any answer it gives. Every question here is answered from the ground with binoculars, from a ladder at the eaves, or from inside the attic with a flashlight. This is deliberate: falls are one of the most common serious injuries in home maintenance, and the useful evidence is not up there anyway. If your answers describe a sagging ridge or a slope that has stopped being flat, the tool stops and sends you to a licensed structural engineer.
When does the water show up?

Timing is the single most useful clue, and it is free. It is also what separates a leak from condensation, which is the mistake this tool exists to prevent.

The one mistake this tool exists to prevent

A large share of wet ceilings in winter are not leaks. Warm, humid air from inside the house rises into a cold attic, condenses on the underside of the roof deck, and comes back down. In a freeze it forms frost first and then releases all at once during a thaw, which produces a sudden soaking that looks exactly like a burst. Nothing is wrong with the roof, and replacing it changes nothing — households have paid for a new roof and had the same wet ceiling the following February. The questions about timing and about what the attic looks like are here to catch that before anybody quotes for anything.

What this tool will never tell you

It will not tell you that something is mold, because that is a sampling result rather than an opinion formed from a description — and it carries no health content at all, because that is a medical question and belongs with a doctor. It will not give you steps for getting onto the roof, breaking the seal on a course of shingles or chipping ice off an eave. It carries no prices, because roofing costs vary by region, pitch, access and season to the point where a figure here would mislead. And it gives no insurance advice — not coverage, not claims, not adjusters — because a site that does not know your policy or your state has no useful opinion about it.

Where a rule depends on where you live — permits, layer limits, ventilation requirements — it says so and points you at your local building department rather than inventing a national answer.

Sources

What this page explains is based on these official sources. If you check one and it does not match what you read here, send it to us and the article gets corrected.