Anyone know anything about roofing improvements?

[albionmoonlight]

Our roof got some hail damage, so our homeowners' insurance will pay to replace it. That's cool.

The roofing guy has suggested the following additional improvements for which we will have to pay out of pocket if we want them. I know nothing about roofs, so I'd like a sense of how "worth it" these other improvements are:

(1) replacement of flashing around chimney. This one we will almost certainly do. We've had issues with that chimney leaking before, so I don't want to play games with it.

(2) The roof only had 16 feet of ridge vent, so that is all they are paying to replace. Our house has ~100 feet of roof. The roofer says that putting ridge vent all around would be the best option for ventilating the attic. We have not had mold problems in the attic before, so I'm not sure what the additional ridge vent would do.

(3) Installing ice and water shield membrane along the roof valleys. Necessary? Helpful? Worth it?



Thanks for any insights.

[Ksyrup]

Can't really help, except to agree on #1.

[PilotMan]

You have over 100 linear feet of roof at the ridge? That's a good sized roof! Your roofer isn't wrong. The more venting you have the better ventilation and circulation you'll have. It's typical for a home to have the entire ridge vented if that's how they choose to do it.


The rest is peace of mind. You have a chance to maximize your water protection for your house now, when they are replacing it. That's pretty much it. The flashing seems like a no brainer. I honestly don't remember if they put that in when ours was redone or not. How steep is the pitch of the roof? Do you have a lot of snow/or freezing temps where you can get an ice dam back under the shingles? The newer shingles should help prevent that anyway. Valleys typically are the weak spots simply because of the amount of water and they move. It's really your call, but you should keep researching it, for sure.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Ditto in agreement on #1.

#3 seems like a how's-your-weather issue

On #2, I found this guideline fwiw

Q: How much ventilation does an attic need?

The starting point for any attic ventilation project is always, “What is the size of the attic space to be vented?” The International Residential Building Code (IRC) defines attic size in terms of its square footage – length x width, floor of the attic. Once a contractor knows the attic square footage, the amount of necessary attic ventilation can be calculated.

The code minimum for attic ventilation in the 2012 IRC, Section R806 – Roof Ventilation[1] is as follows: 1 sq. ft. of Net Free Area for every 150 sq. ft. of attic floor space. This means, for every 150 square feet of attic floor space there should be 1 square foot of Net Free Area.

That's the minimum standard, so I'd probably want to know how I stacked up against that before considering changes (I mean, if you're well below then adding more would seem to make sense. If you're well above then, umm ... )

[stevew]

If the out of pocket isn't unreasonable, it's probably going to be way cheaper to do these things now than to have it done separately.

See what his price is and maybe you can knock it down some since they're already there.

[AlexB]

I’d love to offer some sort of insight, but I’m afraid all this stuff is way over my head....

Sorry.

[dubb93]

Just had a new roof put on, I really can’t answer any of these questions specifically but I would suggest being there when they put it on and if you know of any bad spots ahead of time making sure they put new plywood there. They had to call back the “plywood” guy when they put mine on because I pointed out a spot I knew was bad and wanted to know why it wasn’t replaced.