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attic ventilation: Climbing Trees and Bad Toupees - 03/12/08 12:25 PM
When I was a kid about 10 years old, I loved to climb trees, much to the worriment of my mom. I even built a tree house for some friends and me in the back yard...but that's a story for another time.
Recently I have begun to call on those old climbing skills as I inspect attics. Where the construction and roof truss braces allow, I climb up to the top of the attic to get a close look at a frequent source of problems, the ridge vent.
Ridge vents are an essential part of a modern roofing system. They allow … (7 comments)

attic ventilation: The Peek-A-Boo Gable! - 11/08/07 12:07 PM
I almost missed it!
Lots of people had missed it. The owner, who had the house built 20 years ago and had lived in it all these years. The builder. The county inspectors. The roofer. The second roofer who installed a new roof one year ago.
Yet there it was. In plain sight! I saw it because I was showing the owner the various components of his attic ventilation system. I was making the point that even with the great full length ridge vent installed last year with the new roof, ventilation was still limited in the attic because nothing had been done … (10 comments)

attic ventilation: Cat on a Hot Roof! - 10/19/07 06:40 PM
"Oh good!" I thought to my self as I drove up the driveway. "A relatively new roof, 30 year shingles, and they threw in a ridge vent."
On a 30 year old house, I had expected to see a roof covering that was not original. Worst case scenerio, they had replaced the original roof at say 15 years, and would be looking at the end of life of a second set of 20 year shingles. Best case, the original shingles had lasted longer and the current roof would be newer. In this case however, the owner had upgraded to a longer … (10 comments)

attic ventilation: Silence of the Fan! - 09/20/07 07:24 PM
This was one of those cases where I had both the owner and the buyer in the house at the same time.  My agent told the owner about the attic fan in the story below and it was a bit embarrassing for her because she was trying to do the right thing. 
The seller had the right idea.
Three years ago, she replaced the 18 year old shingles on her house with top of the line 30 year shingles and installed a ridge vent the entire length of the roof ridge.
She also asked the roofing company to install an attic fan on a … (4 comments)

attic ventilation: The Sacrificial Attic Fan - 09/19/07 07:06 AM
When I wrote this news letter over a year ago, this was the first instance I had found like this.  Since then I have found it three more times, always in a house built in the late 1970's early 1980's.  It was a time when the economy was out of control, inflation, unemployment, and interest rates in the double digits! People were looking for ways to cut costs and they wanted to do something, anything, with their own hands to fight the problem.
Up until the sixties and seventies, soffit vents and ridge vents were a bit of a novelty.  You rarely see them much … (8 comments)

 

Bill Duncan

Haymarket, VA

More about me…

Home Status Inspection Company, LLC

Address: 4208 High Ridge Road, Haymarket, VA, 20169

Office Phone: (703) 754-9992

Cell Phone: (703) 283-6375

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