Roof Maxx · asphalt shingles

Roof rejuvenation

Roof Maxx is a soy methyl ester based water emulsion. It is spray applied and absorbs into the shingle in 30 minutes to one hour, depending on ambient temperature. Asphalt shingles only. Not tile.

As a shingle ages, oil dries, the asphalt becomes brittle, expand-and-contract fails, and the shingle breaks. Treatment restores flexibility.

Each Roof Maxx treatment adds 5 years of warranted service life. Up to 3 treatments for a total of 15 years.

That figure is the Roof Maxx product warranty on the treatment, and it is the only place on this site it belongs. It is not the transferable warranty we carry on a Roof Coat installation, and it is not a statement about what an insurance carrier will accept.

The fifteen is a ceiling, not a schedule. We inspect before every treatment, and a roof that has moved past rejuvenation does not get a second pass just because it took a first one well.

Cost is roughly 20 to 25 percent of replacement when the roof qualifies.

Roof Maxx certified dealer mark — Certified Roof Maxx Dealer · Dealer #10333

What a treatment day looks like

Two people on most roofs, hoses run off the truck, and a pass over every slope. Most roofs are done in a day, and you keep using the house while we are up there.

Two crew members in hard hats treating the low entry roof of a Simi Valley home, one spraying from up on the slope and a second working the eave course with a wand from a ladder — Simi Valley — the eave course worked from a ladder, the rest from up on the slope

Crew treating composition slopes with Roof Maxx beside a separate flat gray roof section. — Ventura — Roof Maxx on the shingle slopes. The flat gray deck they are walking is a separate low-slope system and is not part of the oil treatment.

Two crew members in hard hats spraying Roof Maxx along the ridge of a low-slope composition roof — Ventura — working the ridge on a low-slope roof

A pass leaves a line you can see with your boots next to it and again from the air. Roof Maxx comes out of the wand milky white, so the field that has just been sprayed is the pale one and the darker shingle next to it is the part that has not been sprayed yet.

That reverses while you watch. Over the next ten or twenty minutes the emulsion starts going into the asphalt, the white fades out of it, and the same shingle reads dark and wet instead. An hour or two after that it has soaked in and the roof looks like a roof again — which is the point, and also why the difference is worth photographing on the day. Both frames below are that first minute, not the last. Up close the edge steps along the courses; from above it is the shape of the whole job.

Close-up of composition shingle mid-treatment. Right half wet milky Roof Maxx; left half original dry shingle still waiting. — Ventura — mid-pass. The white field on the right is Roof Maxx still wet on the shingle. The darker field on the left has not been sprayed yet.

Aerial view of two crew members treating a hip roof, white spray visible off the wand and a milky arc of freshly sprayed Roof Maxx spreading across the brown shingle beside it — Ojai — the white arc is the pass that just went down

The roof to treat is the one still doing its job

The estate below is in Ojai: a little over 5,000 square feet of composition shingle, fifteen years old, and not leaking. That is the candidate rejuvenation was built for. The mat and the granules are still there. What has dried out is the oil, and the oil is the part we can put back.

Waiting for a stain on a ceiling changes the conversation. Once the mat is showing or the granules are gone, the honest answer is a coating or a replacement, and both cost several times what a treatment does.

It took three of us. Below is that roof twice: the whole property with the passes still white on it, and the leading edge of one moving downslope.

Aerial view of a long single-story estate roof mid-treatment, pale milky patches of freshly sprayed Roof Maxx across the brown composition slopes, crew working and hoses run from the truck in the drive. — Ojai — about 5,000 sq ft composition, mid-treatment. Pale patches are wet Roof Maxx, not granule loss.

Aerial view of a large estate roof mid-treatment with three crew members working, milky white Roof Maxx spreading down the near slopes across the brown shingle, a riding arena beyond — Ojai — three of us on it, the white spreading downslope is the product

Past the point where oil helps

The rule we work to is about thirty percent granule loss. Past that a roof does not get a treatment from us, and the reason is not the granules. It is what the missing granules have already let happen underneath them.

Low view across a Simi Valley composition slope where bare fiberglass mat shows as a pale stripe below every keyway, the granules and the asphalt under them worn away along each runoff path. — Simi Valley — the pale stripes are bare mat below every keyway. This roof did not qualify for Roof Maxx. Coat or replace.

Granules are the shingle's sunscreen. Their job is to keep UV off the asphalt below them, and for most of a roof's life they do it. Once enough of them are gone, that asphalt starts taking the sun directly. It dries, it goes to powder, and it leaves down the gutter over the following winters.

What is left is the fiberglass mat, the web the shingle was built around. That is the pale material running down this slope. Mat is reinforcement, not waterproofing, and there is no oil left anywhere in it to soften — which is the entire mechanism a treatment depends on.

It arrives in stripes because that is how water moves. Every keyway funnels the runoff from the course above onto one narrow band of the shingle below it, so those bands wear out well ahead of the tab faces on either side. From overhead you can see it is not one bad slope.

The same Simi Valley roof from directly overhead, pale worn channels running down from the keyways across the whole field on both sides of the ridge. — The same Simi Valley roof from overhead — the wear is the whole field, not one slope. This roof did not qualify for Roof Maxx. Coat or replace.

Both frames are the same Simi Valley house, seconds apart. It did not qualify. A roof this far along is a Roof Coat or a replacement, and hearing that at the inspection costs a good deal less than hearing it after you have paid for a treatment with nothing left to treat.

Somebody has already been up here

A single dab of mastic around a pipe collar is normal maintenance and says nothing bad about a roof. Six of them spread across one slope says something else, and it is worth being able to read before an estimate lands in front of you.

Six separate patches of dark asphalt mastic troweled onto a badly worn composition slope in Simi Valley, each spread across several shingle courses, the field around them mottled pale where the granules have gone. — Simi Valley — six mastic patches on one slope, not one of them at a pipe or a flashing. This slope came off the treatment list.

Start with where they are not. There is no pipe, no vent, no valley and no flashing anywhere in that frame. Every patch is out in the open field, on shingle that was supposed to be shedding water by itself, so each one marks a leak that started somewhere nothing was penetrating the roof.

Then look at how they were made. Each is troweled straight across several courses at once, which glues shut the laps the roof relies on to move. Asphalt cement cures harder than the shingle under it, so when the deck warms and the courses shift, the patch is the part that gives. On the largest one here the split runs along the course lap underneath it and one side has already lifted.

We seal things too, and it is in every tune-up: open fastener holes, a tired flashing, a pipe boot gone hard. The difference is what sits underneath. Sealant belongs on a detail the shingle was never asked to waterproof on its own. Troweled across open field it is not a repair, it is another year — and the field around these shows what the year was bought against, mottled pale on every tab where the granules have worn off.

So this slope is off the treatment list, and the patches are the part you can use. They are the first thing visible from a ladder that says the leaks have stopped being one-offs, which is worth knowing while there is still a choice of paths left to make.

What Roof Maxx says it does

This is the manufacturer's material, not ours — their cutaway and their videos. Read it as the claim. The section after it is the part that was measured by somebody who does not sell the product.

Roof Maxx diagram of an asphalt shingle in cross-section — protective top coating, weathering asphalt, fiberglass mat — with soy oil droplets soaking in, beside five labeled outcomes: shingle pliability, protective top coating, shingle permeability, hail impact, and fire spread of flame — Roof Maxx's own diagram of what the treatment is meant to do. What was measured, and how, is below.

How Roof Maxx works

What is different about today's shingles

What the 2018 OSU paper measured

Pliability

ASTM D3462 pliability: treated shingles passed, including weather-side down in both machine and cross-machine directions. Untreated shingles failed weather-side down.

Granule adhesion

ASTM D3462 and ASTM D4977 granule adhesion: displaced-granule weight decreased 46 percent versus untreated, closer to new-shingle levels.

Permeability

ASTM E96 permeability: treated shingles measured about 60 percent higher water-vapor permeability than untreated, closer to new-shingle levels (Vasco-Correa & Shah, 2018).

Hail

A more flexible shingle can absorb hail impact instead of cracking. That follows from the ASTM D3462 pliability result. We do not claim a hail-resistance rating, a Class 4 impact label, or an insurance discount.

Cover of the 2018 Ohio State Roof Maxx technical report — The 2018 Ohio State technical report. Third-party lab testing, not an endorsement of Roof Maxx by the university.

Vasco-Correa, J., & Shah, A. (2018). Roof Maxx Technical Report Final. Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering, The Ohio State University / OARDC Wooster. PRI Construction Materials Technologies tests on 17-year three-tab shingles at 1 gallon per 100 square feet.

The OSU study is not an endorsement of Roof Maxx by The Ohio State University.

What it does not do

It does not repair structure or replace rotten decking.
It does not seal active leaks.
It is not for tile.

Who qualifies

Best on asphalt shingles that are tired but not failed: mat intact, granules mostly still on it, nothing leaking. Heavy granule loss, exposed mat, or a roof the insurer will not keep usually move the job to Roof Coat or replacement.

What you get back

We inspect and treat from the roof, and we photograph what we find on the way. You see the same pictures we work from, including the ones that say your roof does not need us yet.

What we fix first

Oil does not seal a hole. The tune-up runs the same day, ahead of the treatment, and it is how the roof gets sound enough to be worth treating. None of what follows is a change order at the end of the afternoon.

Two shingle tabs missing from the course just below a Simi Valley ridge, leaving the gray headlap of the course beneath exposed, with a nail head visible in the left gap. — Simi Valley — missing tabs. We replace these during the tune-up on treatment day. Oil does not fix a missing tab.

Looking up a composition slope to the eave, where one shingle in the bottom course is tented into a low ridge and lifted off the drip edge while the courses beside it lie flat. — Simi Valley — a nail backing out under the bottom course. Reset during the tune-up, before any product goes down.

Missing tabs are the obvious one. Wind gets under an edge and takes the tab with it, and what it leaves open is the headlap of the course underneath — the thin unweathered strip that is holding the nails for the course above. We replace the tab. A new one will not match a field that has been in the sun for twenty years, and it weathers in.

The other frame is the one people walk past. That bottom course is tented into a low ridge and lifted off the drip edge because a nail has worked its way back out and is pushing up underneath. It has not come through yet. Dry shingle is brittle, so left alone it will, and then it is a hole in the field instead of a nail to reseat.

Close inspection photo of open fastener holes left in the field of a composition shingle. — Thousand Oaks — open fastener holes in the shingle field. Sealed during the tune-up, before any product goes down.

Open fastener holes are the ones nobody notices, because whatever was screwed down up there usually came off years ago and took the reason to look with it. They go straight through the shingle and into the deck.

Those get sealed, along with tired flashings and any pipe boot that has gone hard. Then the roof is ready for product.

A bad ridge is not a bad roof

The ridge is the most exposed line on the house. It takes sun from both sides all day and it is the first edge the wind gets under, so caps regularly give out years ahead of the shingle they sit on. On its own that is a repair, not a reason to replace a roof.

View down a roof ridge where every cap shingle has split into layers and lost its granules, leaving bare mat open to the sky, while the composition field on both slopes is still intact. — Ventura — the caps are past repair and get replaced. The field on both slopes is sound, which is the separate question that decides the treatment.

Both halves of the decision are in that one frame. The field is what we want to treat: granules still on it, tab edges clean, no mat showing on either slope. The caps are past repair. They have split into layers, the granules are gone, the mat underneath is open to the sky, and broken pieces of them are sitting on the shingle below.

So the caps come off. We strip them and the leftover material off the ridge, install new caps, and then run the standard full-service tune-up and treatment across the whole roof. It goes on the estimate as its own line rather than inside the tune-up, because it is material and labor, and you should see it priced instead of buried.

Read the field, not the ridge. The Ojai roof on the Roof Coat page is this one inverted: its caps had been dabbed with sealant for years, but the mat was showing through across every tab in the field, and that is what moved it off a treatment and onto a film.

The part of your roof that is not shingle

A lot of houses around here are pitched shingle everywhere except one piece — a porch, an addition, a second-story deck sitting nearly flat. That piece is usually rolled asphalt rather than shingle, and rejuvenating oil is not the answer for it. Oil soaks into a shingle. A rolled roof fails at its laps, and nothing you soak into it changes that.

It is not a reason to leave the rest of the roof alone. One house in Thousand Oaks split exactly that way: the steep hip took the full tune-up and the treatment, and the low-slope deck behind it took a white reflective coating instead, both on the same visit. That job is on the coatings page. If your house has both, say so when you call and we will look at both.

Solar stays where it is

Panels are the reason a lot of people put the job off. On a replacement the array has to come down and go back up, and that is a separate bill from the solar company stacked on top of the roofing bill.

A treatment does not work that way. We sheet the array over before anything is sprayed, treat the shingle around and above it, and pull the covers at the end of the day. Nothing is unbolted and no panel leaves the roof.

The shingle underneath the panels is the one part we cannot reach. It is also the part that never sees direct sun, which is what dries the oil out of a shingle in the first place.

Covering comes first. The Simi Valley roof below is straight overhead before the first pass: every array wrapped, and the shingle around them still dry.

Overhead view of a Simi Valley roof where each solar array is wrapped in its own sheet of clear film that laps past the panel frames onto the surrounding composition shingle, which is still dry — Simi Valley — each array under its own sheet, the film lapped past the frame onto the shingle

Aerial view along an estate ridge, two crew members walking the slope with a hose while the solar array beside them stays covered in protective sheeting — Ojai — treating the slope above a sheeted array

Overhead view of a solar array sheeted over in plastic while two crew members spray Roof Maxx across the shingle above it — Ojai — panels covered, shingle treated around them

A roof-mounted solar array covered edge to edge in protective sheeting, the shingle around it darkened where the treatment has soaked in, a ladder at the eave — Ojai — the array stayed on the roof all day

Fire performance

Independent testing found Roof Maxx did not reduce shingles' fire performance.

We do not claim Roof Maxx confers, upgrades, provides, or guarantees a Class A rating. It is not a non-combustible roofing solution. PRI spread-of-flame was a PRI proprietary method simulating ASTM E108 Class A. It was not the ASTM E108 test itself.

5.0 · 21 reviews

Google reviews · Roof Maxx of Simi Valley

“As senior citizens, the concern for our 23 year old roof was a concern. Our son informed us of a technology that is sprayed on to enhance the life of the roof. We contacted Roof Maxx and received a prompt response. Keith came to give us a free estimate. He took pictures with the drone as well as climbing up on the roof and pointing out what would need to be done. Keith's knowledge and belief in the process gave us the confidence to go forward. Not only does he come out for the estimate but he also does the work. Before the appointment he e-mailed the photos he took and exactly what it would cost. He also included a number of reference. The first person we went to visit for a reference could not say enough good about the crew and the work done. That's all we needed to know. The next week Keith was here along with the owner, Matt. The work was done in a matter of a few hours. We now have a clean looking protected roof along with a 5 year warranty. We highly recommend this company.”
Annette Campbell · Google
“I don't normally write reviews but my experience with Roof Max was exceptional. The shingles on the back side of my home were losing a lot of their gravel and were beginning to curl at their edges. The front of the roof is still in pretty good shape. I was considering replacing the roof until I reached out to the company that installed my solar panels. They quoted a price of $30,000 which would include a $500 per panel fee for removing and reattaching the solar panels. I kept seeing the ads for RoofMax on television but kept putting off calling them. When I told my chiropractor about my roof issues, he suggested I call Spencer. I called Spencer and he came to my house that afternoon with a drone. He took numerous pictures of my roof and then we discussed what options I had. The front was in good shape and was a candidate for the regular oil-based Roof Max treatment, but the back roof wasn't because it had lost 60% of the protective gravel. Roof Coat was the option for the back roof, which is an acrylic paint that adds a protective layer for waterproofing and improves the look of the roof. The crew that did the work were very friendly, informative and efficient. Keith, Chase and Alex did an excellent job and my roof looks great. My problems with the roof were resolved within a few days of contacting Roof Max. I would highly recommend Roof Max out of Simi Valley.”
Kristen Bushnell · Google
“We wanted to thank RoofMaxx for the amazing work they did on our home and garage. Keith and his assistant arrived right at the appointment time and completed the work with meticulous attention to detail including re-caulking needed areas, painting the stacks to match the roof, and even washing off the driveway and sidewalk. Our roofs look new again, and it's nice to know that this small financial investment is adding so many years to the integrity of our shingles and protecting us from potential water damage.”
Danielle Olson · Google
“Roof Maxx explained the process and what it will do to extend the life of my roof. They showed up on time and completed the job. Total professionals from start to finish. Picture of Keith on my roof.”
Robert Garriss · Google
“Keith was professional and thorough in his work with my properties. I appreciated how quickly he responded to my questions and requests. I am looking forward to seeing how the product weathers over time.”
Joy Wenzlaff · Google
“These guys were great! Not only did they apply a thorough coating of Roofmax product evenly over my roof, but they went around my home with a hose ensuring none of the product got on my walls or plants. They also do a great job of patching and caulking of all roof protrusions. Nice polite guys. Insurance company was satisfied. Would highly recommend!”
Nikolas Kasak · Google

Read the Roof Maxx of Simi Valley listing on Google

Questions we actually get

What is Roof Maxx?: Roof Maxx is a soy methyl ester based water emulsion. It is spray applied and absorbs into the shingle in 30 minutes to one hour, depending on ambient temperature. Asphalt shingles only. Not tile.
How long does one treatment last?: Each Roof Maxx treatment adds 5 years of warranted service life. Up to 3 treatments for a total of 15 years.
Does it change fire performance?: Independent testing found Roof Maxx did not reduce shingles' fire performance. We do not claim Roof Maxx confers, upgrades, provides, or guarantees a Class A rating. It is not a non-combustible roofing solution.
What about hail?: A more flexible shingle can absorb hail impact instead of cracking. That follows from the ASTM D3462 pliability result. We do not claim a hail-resistance rating, a Class 4 impact label, or an insurance discount.
Did Ohio State endorse the product?: The OSU study is not an endorsement of Roof Maxx by The Ohio State University.

See if your roof qualifies