Roof Ventilation

LESLIE: Don in Pennsylvania is on the line with a roofing-and-ventilation question. Tell us what’s going on.

DON: We live in a house. It’s about 60 years old now. It has gable vents in the attic, regular style roof. And anyway, the roofer suggested that when the house was reroofed, that we put a full-length ridge vent in the house. The house is an L-shape with that actually makes the back a T.

So, anyway, the first year after the roof was changed, went through winter, wound up – we noticed discoloration in the ceiling – in the Armstrong ceiling in our office. And so I went upstairs and found out there was 2 inches of snow in the attic.

TOM: Uh-oh.

DON: So I wondered, did we go to the point of having too much ventilation? Because we never had trouble before.

TOM: Yeah, it’s really not possible to have too much venting done.

Now, the type of vent – ridge vent – that the roofer put in, what he should have put in is something called a “filter vent.” And a filter vent basically has a filtering material, right inside the ridge vent, that’s designed to be a weather filter. So it stops the snow from blowing in. If that filter part is missing, that might be the reason you’re getting a lot of snow. But as I said, if a little bit of snow is blowing in, I wouldn’t worry about it. If a lot of snow is blowing in and it’s happening a lot, then you might want to consider replacing that ridge vent with the right type.

DON: I see. Thank you.