Comparison · Siding materials
Which siding belongs on a Panhandle house
Four materials that all work here, judged on the things that actually differ: what hail does to them, what happens when one panel is damaged, and how they behave through a western Nebraska winter.
Schank Roofing · Scottsbluff, Nebraska · Updated 2026-09-22
What hail does to each
This is the Panhandle question and it separates the four more cleanly than anything else.
- Vinyl
- Cracks and punctures, usually on the storm-facing walls and often below windows where the panel is already stressed. The cracks are thin and hide in the shadow line of each course, which is why a close walk-around finds things a glance from the driveway does not.
- Steel and aluminium
- Dent rather than crack. The wall stays watertight, so whether it is worth replacing becomes a question about appearance and about your policy rather than about water getting in.
- Fiber cement
- Chips and cracks under heavy impact, but it takes considerably more to mark it than vinyl. Damage tends to be localised rather than across a whole elevation.
- Engineered wood
- Dents and gouges. Like fiber cement it resists more than vinyl, and like all of them the damage concentrates on the walls that faced the storm.
Repairs, and the colour-match problem
Any of these can be replaced panel by panel. The catch is the same for all four and nobody mentions it at the quote stage: siding fades.
If the siding is recent, a replaced panel disappears. If it has been on the house eight years, the new panel is the right colour and the wall around it is not, and the patch is visible from the street. That is a genuine trade-off between a cheaper repair and a uniform wall, and it is worth deciding deliberately rather than discovering afterwards.
Cold, wind and the things people forget
- Vinyl gets more brittle as it gets colder, which is why impact damage tends to happen in the same storms that bring the coldest air.
- All four expand and contract, and vinyl the most. It is fastened to allow for that on purpose, which is why a panel that has been nailed tight buckles in summer.
- Wind lifts and unclips siding courses on exposed gable ends. A lifted course looks fine from the street and is open behind it.
- Fiber cement is heavy enough that installation cost is a real part of the comparison, not a rounding error.
Brand names get thrown around in this category. The material type decides almost everything on this page; the brand decides the warranty and the colour range.
How to actually decide
- Start with your hail exposure and which walls take the weather.
- Decide honestly how long you are keeping the house, because that is what makes a more expensive material worth it.
- Look at the fade question: are you likely to want a patch in five years, or a whole elevation?
- Then get the walls inspected with the roof, because storm damage usually crosses both and the claim treats them separately.