With Warmer Weather on the Way, You Need All the Ventilation You Can Get
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It’s finally starting to look like spring in North Texas, and after a long hard winter (for us), your vents are probably looking pretty rough — filled with lint, pet hair, and dust from all that extra time indoors. But vent cleaning isn’t what we’re here to talk about today. We’re actually looking at ventilation generally, because HVAC vents aren’t the only type of vents in your house. There are plumbing vent pipes, attic vents, laundry vents, hood vents, bathroom vents, water heater flue vents — I could go on. And what better time to air out your home than spring.
Here are some vent-related examples from the inspectors:
Let’s Play ‘Where’s the Vent?’
Whether this was a DIY job or contractors who failed to see the big picture, that exhaust vent isn’t doing anyone any good in the closet. The laundry room exhaust vent prevents mold growth and takes away airborne contaminants like lint and detergent fumes by pulling air away from the room to the outside. When you renovate and split off the exhaust vent from the laundry room, well, you need to put in a new exhaust vent.
Round Two
This time we’re playing for air conditioning vents, or registers. Even though this home has been lived in for two years, they’re just now discovering that there are no registers in the master bath. Girlfriend has been sweating her makeup off before she can even leave the bathroom every morning! As Inspector Brian points out, had the original owners of this new construction home had a phase inspection, this oversight would have been caught by an inspector, avoiding two years of hot morning routines and other … bathroom experiences.
Round Three
And now for a completely different type of vent. Where’s the attic vent? Here we have a flip house in which they added a second level, which you can see in the second picture. Super cute, adds some square footage — no problem, right? Problem! When they put on the addition, they covered up the gable vents in the original roof, which allow air to flow in and out of the attic. See the faint outline in the first picture? That used to be a gable vent.
And in the new roof, they didn’t add any ventilation there either. There are no soffit vents, no gable vents, only a turbine to let air out, but nothing to let air in. So this home’s roof — both roofs — isn’t going to last very long. When you don’t have proper ventilation, it causes excess heat, which causes the shingles to deteriorate much faster.
The moral of the story is, ventilation is important, most especially going into the warmer months of the year. If you don’t have your vents in proper working order, things are going to get hot, and for appliances and systems in your house, that can be much worse than just being a little uncomfortable.
