Perfectly balanced, as all ventilation systems should be

By Emma Peterson. 

The key to a healthy and sound roof is a carefully designed ventilation system. 

Proper ventilation is a key part of a sound roofing system. Without proper ventilation, moisture gets trapped in spaces underneath the roof, like in the attic, and causes health and structural issues. In this episode of Roofing Road Trips®, Heidi J. Ellsworth got the chance to talk to Mark Huysken from Quarrix Building Products about this issue. Mark is now in his fifth year working at Quarrix, but has been working in the roofing industry for over two decades now.  

Over that time, he’s realized that the main struggle is making a building envelope that balances the right amount of seal with the right amount of ventilation. He explained that the key to overcoming this struggle is to assess each situation individually. He shared, “You have to assess the situation. Part of that means going into the attic and looking at the intake and seeing if it's wide open. There may be existing intake on the overhangs in the eaves, there may be some great vetted soffit, but maybe it's all plugged up or maybe it was good ventilation 20 years ago, but it's been painted over 10 times and since then the insulation's been blown around.”  

Mark noted that this can be challenging, especially if it's an old system without a lot of available information about the design, but it’s crucial to investigate and do the math. He explained, “You can't exceed your intake with your exhaust. You're going to have just failures at that point. Really bad failures.” When this is done, you start to see your exhaust pulling air instead of pushing it out and the air in the attic does not move properly.  

Mark explained that the most common reason the balance of intake and exhaust is thrown off is due to an industry misconception that more and bigger is always the solution. He elaborated, “I get calls saying the attic's really hot, so I'm installing more vents. And I go, hang on. If your attic is hot and you feel you need more vents, you need to step back and look at the intake because if the intake is not there, you can keep putting exhaust vents on all day long and all that's going to happen is you're going to get swirling around the top of your roof as the air jumps from one exhaust vent to the other exhaust vent. But everything below that is just stagnant. Nothing's happening at all.” 

Read the transcript or Listen to the entire episode to learn more about the importance of balance when installing roof ventilation.