Hi, this is Steve from Roofer 911. I'm on a roof in Vienna, Virginia.
I wanted to explain to you why this ridge vent is leaking. Many contractors, when they go up on the roof, if they see the nails are not sealed that well they're gonna say, "Well that's the source of the problem", and they'll tell the homeowner, "Well we'll just seal the nail heads and everything will be fine."
After one or two heavy rains, the leak comes back again. Now the contractor's confused, why is it still leaking? Little does he know that the outside of the ridge vent is not the problem but instead, it's the underside. What happens is, when there's a heavy downpour the water bounces off the roof and it can back up underneath the ridge vent.
If there's a driving rain, the water gets underneath the ridge vent then the water finds an opening through that open breather. Also, if there's a heavy melting snow. With all the pressure on top of the roof, sometimes the water can back up, go uphill, and the water will go underneath the ridge vent.
Here you can see the plywood is a little bit- It takes a dip right there. The reason why is because the water has gotten underneath the ridge vent and it caused the plywood to rot. This is one area right here you can see it's soft. There's another area right here, and this is soft.
This is a problem. Not only do you have rotted wood directly below the ridge vent, but that water is traveling underneath the roof shingles and wherever the water finds an opening like a tear in the felt, that's where the water will settle and it will leak into the attic. Eventually that rotted wood is going to go down and we could have rotted wood all the way down to the gutter line.
Many times the water doesn't stop there, the water will travel down inside the exterior wall and it can settle inside the basement. Ridge vents are very very important, they must be done correctly the first time.
What we'll do is, we're going to remove this ridge vent which is about 40 feet. Once it's removed, any plywood that's damaged we've got to remove and replace it with new. Then we'll install new felt, re-shingle it.
Before we put a new ridge vent on, we need to seal the deck heavy at both sides of the ridge, then the new ridge vent is going to be pressed right into the sealant. Very important, when we fasten it into place we need to make sure that we hit the rafters underneath and then we reseal the fasteners.
In here, where that plywood is soft. You can see, it's just coming off. Changing this ridge vent and changing the damaged plywood, and sealing underneath the ridge vent is so important.
My name again is Steve, from Roofer 911. We service all areas of Vienna Virginia and Northern Virginia. If you would like an estimate, please give me a call at (703) 475-2446. Thank you.
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