When we get on your roof for a well-care checkup, we’re checking to make sure that your ventilation is balanced. It’s one of the most important parts of a healthy roof and home. Sometimes homeowners, trying to get more airflow, will put a power fan in. Well, kudos to them for thinking about convection and moving air throw the home, but we’ve got to make sure those power fans aren’t doing more harm than good.
Here’s the issue: if you install a power fan and you have a bunch of open can vents up there with it, the power fan is going to pull the least resistance. And the least resistance is just from the can vent next to it. So when that fan comes on, you’ve lost the power of convection. It’s not actually moving the stale air through the home. You can’t mix two types of exhaust ventilation on the same roof.
One of the most effective ways to ventilate a roof is a ridge vent, where we cut two inches on each side of the center beam and then we put a ridge cap that ventilates at the highest point of the roof. That’s the most convection power that you can have without it being mechanically powered. We will sometimes suggest a power fan for an area of the attic with trapped airflow, but we generally want to use free convection energy.
But if you really want to put a power fan in and get a lot of pull, you just need to block those can vents. And we’ve come up with some really unique ideas for soffit ventilation, so when you call Roof Life of Oregon, we can show you what we’ve come up with.