Most of us spend very little time thinking about our attic. Maybe we threw the miscellaneous boxes up there when we moved, only to forget about them shortly after.
Odds are that you haven't been up there in a while. The attic has a big effect on a number of things in your home, though, and we're here to talk a little bit about those things.
More specifically, your attic impacts the heat and cooling of your home as well as the quality of your roof. The key to optimizing these things is proper attic ventilation, and we're here to talk about it.
Let's get started.
Proper Attic Ventilation: The Risks and Rewards
We can separate the issues of attic ventilation into two categories. First, you have the impact it has on the heating and cooling costs of your home. Second, ventilation is crucial to uphold the quality and structure of your roof.
In both cases, the key to improving your situation is to install attic soffits. These are ventilation tools that allow hot air that moves up through your home to be released through a vent. Additionally, cool air from the outside is able to move through soffits and clear out all of the damp, humid air that rises from below.
Remember that heat rises, and the hot air from your house has to go somewhere. That place is your attic, and that heat lingers.
The Impact on Your Roof
A consistently hot attic can cause a lot of problems to your roof. First, the constant heat can do some damage to your shingles from the inside out. Over time, you'll be faced with some costly shingle repairs.
Most importantly, though, is the impact that heat has on roofs in the winter. If you live in an area that experiences snowfall, you might be familiar with the idea of an ice dam.
As snow falls on a warm roof, it melts and runs down to an area, typically the gutter, where it freezes. As more and more snow falls, it all melts and contributes to a bigger and bigger dam. In mid-winter, that dam could get big enough to break portions of your roof, cause leaks, or contribute to collapses.
Those are all costly issues that can be avoided with the simple installation of a soffit.
Electricity Costs
Another thing to consider is the fact that the warm air accumulating in your attic, will return back into your home and make your upstairs levels significantly warmer than they have to be.
Naturally, your cooling system will compensate and keep the upstairs cool, but that will cost you. Over years of that process continuing, you could be losing thousands of dollars in cooling costs.
At the very least, the cost of repairs and electricity bills is far more than the cost of having a soffit system installed in your attic.
Do You Need Soffits?
Many older homes don't have proper attic ventilation. It's not too difficult to improve your attic and start seeing results.
Explore our site for more information on soffits, how they work, and how to move forward with installations.
