The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety conducted the first-ever indoor hailstorm Feb. 20.
At its research center in South Carolina, IBHS used air cannons and homemade ice balls to recreate the damage caused by what IBHS calls “Mother Nature's million-dollar babies.”
The hailstorm research “will enable our scientists to conduct a multi-faceted, first-of-its-kind research initiative, exploring several aspects of building material and assembly performance that researchers have never been able to explore before,” says Julie Rochman, IBHS president and CEO, in a statement.
See video of today's event HERE
Creating hail—and a device to realistically launch the ice balls—wasn't easy. IBHS went through many prototypes before getting it right, settling on a mixture of tap water and seltzer water to get the right shape, density and hardness.
“It makes sense that harder hailstones will cause more damage, but we need to explore that,” says Tanya Brown, a meteorologist and IBHS research engineer. “To do that, we had to create a compressive force device and it had to be portable enough to take into the field (for 
research), where we could find and measure actual hailstones.”
There was no off-the-shelf solution to send the hailstones into the building and car it had set up in the facility. IBHS designed and built multi-barreled cannons they mounted 60 feet above the test house.
About 8,000 to 10,000 hailstones were sent flying at up to 76 mph into a test home with several types of roofs and siding, as well as vinyl and aluminum windows.
Other than observing the impact on various building materials, IBHS will also be able to document differences in man-made and natural damage.
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