Old House Attic Ventilation

In the winter months you want to cover your attic vents if you can.

Old house attic ventilation.

Air sealing and insulation. But if the floor is covered in plywood you can t stuff enough insulation beneath it to do the job sufficiently not even in warm climates. Nowhere is this more common than in the attic. Plan to pull up the flooring and layer new insulation on top of the old.

If the attic is insulated with fiberglass batts just pull back any that are blocking the flow of air. If there s blown in insulation like ours rake back the fluffy stuff with a 3 or 4 ft long 1 x 6 photo 6 or use a garden rake or hoe. Snow melts and the water refreezes on the cold eaves creating ice dams. Attic ventilation adequate natural ventilation is important in the attics of homes.

In other words the entire vent opening doesn t count as vented space. Warm air can also leave through your attic ventilation. Touch your ceiling on a warm sunny day. Intake vents located at the lowest part of the roof under the eaves allow cool.

Unless an older house has undergone an energy upgrade it s certain to have too much air leakage and too little insulation. The fan is typically mounted behind a gable end vent but other types are available that exhaust hot air through a roof vent. For instance attic ventilation is used widely in cold climates to evacuate the warm moist air that escapes from the living space below. Because the simplest and cheapest way to insulate an attic is to add material to the floor.

Attic ventilation works on the principle that heated air naturally rises primarily utilizing two types of vents. Thick ridges of ice on your eaves in winter are a sign of poor attic ventilation. Warm air that escapes rooms below gets trapped in the attic. A hot ceiling tells you that the attic is acting like a solar oven raising your cooling bills and cooking the shingles.

It may seem incongruous to allow cold air into your attic in the middle of winter but attic venting is an important climatic control that protects your house from moisture rot and mold. If a vaporretarder is not present in the ceiling to slow migration of moisture from thehome s interior into the attic attics require 1 square foot of free vent areafor each 150 square feet of attic area. Attics that are already insulated will need more elbow grease. In the summer vents in the attic keep the house nice and cool.