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Should gable vents be sealed after DCI smartvent is intstalled?

3K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  mesaAZ 
#1 ·
Hi,

Recently I had a new roof put on my 33 year old house. When the house was built there were no soffits and the only ventilation for the roof were quite small end gable vents. To correct this problem I had DCI smart vent installed along with crown vents.

During a discussion with a roofer who was doing a house across the street he suggested that I should seal the gable vents and rely only on the DCI smart vents and the crown vents for all the ventilation.

Is he right? Should I seal the gable vents? Given their size it would not be all that hard to do.

I've done some internet searching but I have not found any answers to this?

I would appreciate any thoughts any one has.

Thanks in advance
 
#2 ·
#3 ·
There is no good reason to close the gable vents. What that roofer was talking about is a common misconception regarding air flow and roof vents. There are a lot of variables to consider when venting your roof and attic. You can find more information here;http://www.roofingcontractorreview.com/Roofing/Attic-Ventilation/Roof-and-Attic-Ventilation.html
Many thanks.

In the process of getting my roof done I had ten bids. The reason for so many is about half the roofers didn't even want to talk about the ventilation and the others just wanted to use either O'Haggans vents or whirlybirds. One roofer even wanted me to cut my own soffits! Of course the difficulty in doing that is that it's very difficult to put the baffling from the soffits up to the underside of the roof. There is not much room to work down there and it's very dirty.

I had planned all along to have insulation blown into the attic and with out baffling the blown insulation would have simply covered up the soffit vents rendering them useless. Using the smart vent eliminated the problem of installing baffling. Here in Mesa Arizona it gets a little bit warm here in the summer (+118 degrees) and having proper ventilation and sufficient insulation is a vital component in reducing summer time utility bills.

Thank you again for your reply. Now I don't have to go up and seal the gable vents. Given my experience with roofers and ventilation I didn't exactly trust what this roofer had told me. Most roofers it seems just want to slap and go with singles and don't seem to care about insulation. I had to go through ten bids before I found a roofer who would install the smart vents.
 
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