Loading…
16
Shoutout to the inspector in Red Deer who showed me my attic was never actually vented
For 6 years I thought the ice dams on my roof in Red Deer were just an Alberta thing and I kept climbing up there to chip them off every spring. The guy we hired to look at a different issue popped into the attic, pointed at the soffit vents, and asked why they were stuffed with insulation. My own hands did that when I topped up the attic insulation back in 2019, I just never thought about what the baffles were for. The ice dams stopped after we cleared them out and re-ran the baffles, and I felt like a real idiot for all that roof chipping. How do you know which jobs are safe to DIY and which ones are quietly causing damage for years?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
harperschmidt29d ago
Did you ever figure out a good rule for this stuff? I did almost the same thing with a bathroom fan, I taped over the vent gap in the attic thinking I was sealing out cold air, turns out I was sealing moisture in and the wood up there started looking rough. What helped me was doing a quick search before any job that touches air, water, or wires in the house, because those three are the ones that cause slow hidden damage. If the job changes how air moves through the house, that's my flag to stop and ask someone who knows. Chipping ice off a roof is fine, but the fix was never up there in the first place.
5