When people think about roof services, they often focus on placing shingles on the roof. There is more to a roof than shingles though. Your roof is also the main ventilation point in your home. If it has ventilation problems, a roofing company can fix them. You can identify ventilation issues by checking for these four signs.
Extreme Heat in the Attic
On warm days, the attic is going to be hotter than the rest of the house. However, it shouldn't be unbearably hot. Sufficient ventilation will improve airflow and allow the attic to cool a bit. This will also cool the rest of the house by drawing away the worst of the heat.
Typically, a roof company needs to open gaps for ventilation. They might do this below the caps or underneath the ledges.
Ice Dams
It might seem weird that venting the roof poorly can create ice dams. What happens is that the heat concentrates too much near the edges of the roof. Especially if the ventilation runs along the gutters, this can heat snow into water that will refreeze into ice. If the ventilation is constantly pumping too much heat into too small of an area, the heating and refreezing can become a loop that generates lots of freezing.
A roof contractor will want to add more ventilation. This spreads the exhausted air across a larger area. Consequently, there's less heat pumping into a single gap so the process isn't as intense. Ideally, this stops ice formation.
Condensation or Mold in the Attic
Attics aren't usually going to smell great. However, they should not have visible condensation that leads to mold growth. However, if the roof isn't sufficiently ventilating the building, condensation can collect. Combine condensation with warm air, and you have the formula for mold. In extreme cases, homeowners may even see the mold permeate the second-floor ceilings.
Overworked HVAC
If warm air isn't escaping the roof quickly enough, that backs up the entire process of cooling the house. Warm air in the attic encourages warm air on the second floor. In turn, the first floor eventually suffers. If you have an HVAC system, then it has to work harder to cool the entire house.
You could see long running times and rising electricity bills. If a technician says the HVAC unit is in good shape, then you might want to check whether the roof has enough ventilation.
To learn more, contact a roofing company near you.
Once you watched someone put a roof on a home, you have a much deeper understanding of what's involved in this sort of work. Roofing is not easy. There's a big mental component since the roofers need to decide how how many shingles to use, how to best lay them out, and so forth. Then, there's the physical aspect of roofing. Lugging packages of shingles onto the roof is not easy, and nailing them down take a lot of work, too. With that in mind, we welcome you to read more about roofing on this blog. Let the articles inform your opinion of the profession.