The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety conductedthe first-ever indoor hailstorm Feb. 20.

At its research center in South Carolina, IBHS used air cannonsand homemade ice balls to recreate the damage caused by what IBHScalls “Mother Nature's million-dollar babies.”

The hailstorm research “will enable our scientists to conduct amulti-faceted, first-of-its-kind research initiative, exploringseveral aspects of building material and assembly performance thatresearchers have never been able to explore before,” says JulieRochman, IBHS president and CEO, in a statement.

See video of today's event HERE

Creating hail—and a device to realistically launch the iceballs—wasn't easy. IBHS went through many prototypes before gettingit right, settling on a mixture of tap water and seltzer water toget 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 andIBHS research engineer. “To do that, we had to create a compressiveforce device and it had to be portable enough to take into thefield (for research), where we could find and measure actualhailstones.”

There was no off-the-shelf solution to send the hailstones intothe building and car it had set up in the facility. IBHS designedand built multi-barreled cannons they mounted 60 feet above thetest house.

About 8,000 to 10,000 hailstones were sent flying at up to 76mph into a test home with several types of roofs and siding, aswell 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 andnatural damage.