Ventilation Is Necessary To Protect Your Assets
You never want to wait until it’s too late to think about your home’s attic ventilation in Kent, WA. Ventilation is where the air inside your home and outside your home are allowed to interchange with each other.
This stops your house from becoming airtight. An airtight house leads to harmful pollutants not migrating outside. Instead, they build up inside the home and potentially damage the house itself or even worse – you and those you love.
Even if you don’t have an attic, ventilation for your home in the King County area is crucial.
If you want to protect your family, ventilation is a critical component of your home.
Here at RoofSmart, we know how important ventilation is. We want to assist you in ensuring the health and safety of your home and those in it.
So we’re going to take you through what fixing this issue can look like. You’ll then have a better idea of what will need to happen should this problem arise for you.
How Attic Ventilation Works
Have you ever heard the expression “heat rises”? Well it does, but there’s a reason for that.
Go with me on a little science lesson for a moment.
Cooler air is denser than warmer air. This is because the molecules of cooler air are more closely packed together, which just basically makes it heavier.
The molecules in warmer air on the other hand are not as close together, which makes it lighter.
But let’s not get sidetracked with thermodynamics. What matters is that cooler air is heavier.
Now, warm air doesn’t actually just rise, but it goes to where the temperature is lower.
So cooler air sinks because it’s heavier, which leads to warmer air doing what?
You guessed it.
It rises.
Now why is there a science lesson in the middle of talking about attic ventilation?
Well, we want you to understand something very important about your house in King County, WA.
Warmer air carries more water molecules than cooler air, meaning water vapor will likely be traveling upwards in your home toward your attic if you have one.
Attics create a breezeway. Water vapor wants to continue on its path until it hits a barrier of some sort. The breezeway of the attic acts as a place for water to dissipate or fritter away before it reaches and soaks into wood.
Attics have things like vents and baffles. Baffles, by the way, are basically like channels that move air into the attic, which helps circulate fresh air in and stale air out.
This moves out the moisture that we don’t want up there.
Without an attic, none of this happens.
How RoofSmart Address A Ventilation Issue When a House Doesn’t Have An Attic
So what do we do here at RoofSmart when a house in Kent, WA, desperately needs ventilation but doesn’t have an attic?
We build one.
In this particular house, the lack of ventilation caused the wood to rot and mold to grow – a serious cause for concern.
So here’s what we did.
We added 3.3″ polyiso rigid foam boards. This is a closed cell foam insulation. Then we added 2×4 sleepers, which creates space above the layer of insulation.
And what do we call that?
An attic!
A new roof deck was developed by adding a new plywood layer and new fascia for the additional height. At the eave of the roof, we also added screening, intended to keep bugs and critters out of the new space.
We also completed some mold remediation, sterilizing all mold spores in the attic.
The end result has five times the insulation than the space had before! This means less heat passing through and heating up your house.
So, our new attic space won’t superheat during the summer but will allow for the most important thing we learned here today – ventilation.
In the end, we put a forever metal roof on. These really do last you for life!
It’s safe to say our customer won’t be having any roofing or attic ventilation problems again.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of how we here at RoofSmart can take care of your attic ventilation problem even if you don’t have an attic.
If you find yourself looking for a roofing contractor in Kent, WA, give RoofSmart a call at (206) 487–4877 for a free consultation.
Topics:
