Quote:
Originally Posted by jrref
What you need to realize is there are a few people with engineering or technical backgrounds here on Talk of the Villages. Most people can give you a positive or negative experience using a contractor or making an addition to your home but when it comes to HVAC in your home, measurements become significant. With proper static venting in your attic, yes, that should be enough but how do you know you have adequate ventilation? A roofer looks up and says yes or no? Even an inspector might not really know. That said, unless you have someone who knows what they are doing to go into your attic to measure the insulation, see that all the soffit vents are open, measure the static ventilation, take temperature reading, etc, you don't really kow. Your need for active ventillation can also depend on how you home is positioned, i.e., North, South, East, West facing. At the end of the day the only way for you to know if you need more ventilation without doing all this technical testing is to put a couple of temperature sensors in the attic and measure the trends, see if you have storage melting over your garage and or go up in your attic, if you can, on a hot day and see how it is. All you need is to go into the storage space over your garage to get a gauge if its superheating or not. In my case I put some temperature sensors in my attic measured the trends on hot days then decided to add Solar vents installed by the Solar Guys and then measured after the installation and my attic never goes above 10 degrees over the outside temperature where as before it was super heating at 150+ degrees. Also, you can't go by past eperience of those with solar vents since the newer technology vents are very powerful and have a long guarantee. The only problem is verifying that they are working but most of the time you can see them from your attic storage space. Also a big issue no one is bringing up is fan noise. When you get a large enough fan going in your attic you Will hear it in you living space. So you want to get fans that will add active ventilation but don't expect to be evacuating all the hot air with a very large fan. Just too noisey. Moisture in the attic is also something you want to keep at a minimum and active ventilation will also help.
Finally, adding active ventilation is not an investment, you add it if you need it to make your home more comfortable and prevent your attic from superheating in our Florida environment.
I hope this information helps put thing in perspective when considering adding active attic ventilation.
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Thank you,
One can buy remote blue tooth temp sensors, we use Govee at the moment, for inside and outside temps. We have insulation stacked high, and that certainly helps, but also makes any wiring changes very difficult well as can block the soffit intakes if just blown in.
Of course adding lots of passive vents is also an answer, but balance the number of holes in the roof versus a forced air system. . .
So the answer is always: your current system works for you, until it doesn't. .