Roof Ventilation Maintenance

Roof Ventilation Maintenance in the North Atlanta Area

Maintaining your roof ventilation system is crucial for ensuring your roofing system’s efficiency and longevity. Here are the essential steps:

1. Visual Inspection: Regularly inspect your roof vents for debris such as leaves, sticks, and bird nests. Clear any obstructions to maintain proper airflow.
2. Cleaning: Use a brush or gloves to remove debris from the vent and surrounding areas.
3. Seal Check: Ensure that the vents are properly sealed to prevent leaks and drafts.
4. Insulation Check: Verify that your attic insulation is in good condition and not blocking the vents.
5. Evaluate Ventilation: Assess the overall ventilation in your attic to ensure it meets the required standards.

Proper roof ventilation maintenance helps control moisture, regulate temperature, and extend the lifespan of your roof. Regular professional inspections in the North Atlanta Area can also help identify and address potential issues early on. There are things you can do on your own, or you can call DOM Roofing & Restoration to professionally inspect your roof for free and have a peace of mind that there are no issues that can create bigger problems in the future.

Check your roof ventilation system regularly, ideally every few years, with your roof inspection. Look for signs of weather-related wear and tear, like cracks, open penetrations, rust, loose vents, or damaged shingles around the vents.

How often should roof vents be replaced?

A typical roof ventilation system can work appropriately between 15 and 25 years, but this can depend on the system’s quality, the climate, and the amount of maintenance it gets.

For proper ventilation, both high and low vents should be installed

On paper, high vents are supposed to act as exhaust vents, while low vents should act as intake vents. Convection is supposed to help make this happen. In reality, it all depends on how the wind blows; convection has little to no effect, and it’s never perfect.

The intake vents will typically be soffit vents, while the exhaust vents may consist of ridge vents, turbine vents, box vents, or powered vents… but only one of those.

 

COMMON ISSUES or ventilation recalls we get from homeowners to be repaired/fixed:

INSTALL SOFFIT VENTS – Builders do not Install soffit vents or do not install enough, and we have to come to install soffit vents or add extra soffit vents to bring ventilation up to code. Where the house doesn’t have a soffit, an intelligent Intake vent will be installed closer to the roof edge

RIDGE VENT

• Many times, the Ridge vent is missing. They have installed a couple of box vents that are needed to ventilate the roof correctly. Also, many contractors will install ridge vents and not cut a hole in the ridge for the air to circulate correctly.
• The homeowner can only know if he will go into the attic and see if there’s light coming from the ridge. In this case, the reach has to be removed, and a gap on each side from the center line of the ridge must be cut.

Mixed exhaust vents. REMOVE & CLOSE unnecessary vents

When different roof vents are installed, the attic has an increased potential for air to short-circuit. In the photo above, the power vent would probably end up sucking in air from all of the other high vents in the photo while pulling in just a tiny amount of air from the lower soffit vents.

The solution here is to install only one type of exhaust vent.

POWER VENTS

Some systems, like those with mechanical or electrical components, usually require parts to be replaced more frequently.

Unfortunately, power vent motors tend to fail eventually, so be prepared to replace them at some point in your roof’s lifespan

Unleveled TURBINE VENTS

The turbine vents need to be installed perfectly level (under a right angle); when not installed, they don’t spin (not moving air from the attic and are unfunctional).