Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Bad ventilation can quietly cost you warranty coverage, and you would not know. Shingle manufacturers exclude damage caused by inadequate ventilation. GAF's limited warranty names it in the exclusions list. Nothing announces this. The roof looks normal and the gap only appears when you file a claim.
Ask for your attic's ventilation math in writing at installation, and keep it with the warranty paperwork.
The exclusion is decided by what was actually installed. So documentation at install time is the only proof.
Find your warranty document and read the exclusions section, not the headline term.
A Utah homeowner can buy the best shingle on the market and still own a roof whose warranty will not cover the way it is actually going to fail.
Mattie Tueller, Master Roofing
It excludes the damage bad ventilation causes. The GAF Roofing System Limited Warranty lists what it does not cover. Inadequate ventilation appears in that list by name. Other major manufacturers carry equivalent language. Several require ventilation meeting code or their own published specification as a condition of coverage.
The standard they point to is the same ratio a Utah roof is supposed to be built to anyway. So meeting the warranty condition and meeting code are usually one job, not two.
This is narrower than "your warranty is void," and worse in practice. The warranty still exists. What it stops covering is the category of failure that under-ventilation produces: shingles that curl, crack, blister, or age early from heat underneath.
So the coverage you keep is for defects that were unlikely anyway. The coverage you lose is for the failure your roof is actually heading toward. A homeowner reading "lifetime warranty" on a brochure has no way to see that trade.
Usually at claim time, which is the worst possible moment. You notice curling or cracking, you call the manufacturer or the installer. Someone inspects the attic. If the ventilation does not meet the requirement, the claim closes there. The roof is eight or twelve years old and the money is gone.
Of every 100 attics Master Roofing goes into, about 90 are not ventilated correctly. Most of those homeowners believe they have a warranty that covers them. Nothing in their experience of buying the roof would have told them otherwise.
Get the ventilation measured and corrected, then document it. Correcting the ventilation does not retroactively restore coverage for damage already done. But it stops the clock on further heat damage and it gives you a dated record if a future claim gets questioned. It is also usually a retrofit rather than a new roof.
The measurement is the part worth paying for. That's because a number on paper is what a future claim turns on. What that correction involves is covered in why your upstairs will not cool down, which walks through the fix and what else it improves once the attic is breathing properly again.
Make the ventilation math part of the contract. Ask the company to write your attic's square footage, the required ventilating area, what intake and exhaust exist now. What they are adding, directly onto the estimate. A company doing the work correctly will not hesitate. That's because they already calculated it to price the job.
None of this is an unusual request. The answer takes a company about a minute if they did the work. That paperwork is worth more than the warranty term on the brochure. A twenty-five-year warranty with no proof your attic met the requirement is weaker than a shorter one with the math attached. Reading a bid for this is covered in what attic ventilation has to do with your roof.
The thing that gets me about this one is the timing. At Master Roofing we meet these homeowners years after anybody could have helped them cheaply. The roof is a decade old, the shingles are curling, they have the paperwork in a drawer. They are certain they are covered. Then someone goes in the attic.
I will be fair about how it happens. A crew that never learned the ratio is a code number is not setting out to strip your warranty. The manufacturer is not hiding anything either. That's because the exclusion is printed right there in the document nobody reads. It is a gap that everyone walks past.
A Utah homeowner can buy the best shingle on the market and still own a roof whose warranty will not cover the way it is actually going to fail. The fix costs almost nothing at the right moment. Ask for your attic's ventilation numbers in writing on the day you sign, and keep that page with the warranty. That single sheet is the difference between a claim that gets paid and one that ends in your attic with a flashlight.
This article is general information about Utah roofs, not an assessment of yours. Every roof is different, and no article can tell you what is actually happening on your specific house. Have a licensed roofing contractor look at it in person before you act on anything here.
Not usually. The common structure is an exclusion rather than a cancellation: the warranty stays in force but does not cover damage caused by inadequate ventilation. In practice that is close to the same thing. That's because heat damage from a badly ventilated attic is the most likely way an asphalt roof fails early. Read your document's exclusions section for the exact wording.
That is a workmanship question and it belongs to the installer, not the manufacturer. Ventilation is a code item the roofing contractor is responsible for. So a roof built short of the requirement is an installation failure. Whether you have practical recourse depends on the company's workmanship warranty and whether they are still in business. That's a good argument for hiring locally.
It protects the roof going forward rather than undoing past damage. Shingles that already dried out and cracked from years of trapped heat do not recover. A manufacturer is unlikely to cover damage that predates the correction. What the fix buys you is a stop to further heat damage and dated documentation. That matters if you ever need to show the roof met the requirement.
The requirement exists across roofing types, though the terms differ by manufacturer and by product. Ventilation matters structurally on any roof assembly. That's because trapped moisture affects the deck underneath regardless of what covers it. Ask for the specific warranty document for the product going on your house rather than assuming the asphalt rules carry over, since the exclusions are written per product line.
Yes, register it. Registration is usually free, it sometimes extends the term. Having the roof on record costs you nothing at all. An unregistered warranty leaves you with fewer options rather than more. Register it, and then separately have the ventilation measured. So you know where you actually stand instead of finding out in the middle of a claim years from now.
We're here to see what's going on with your roof. A real assessment starts with your history and your attic, not a number from the driveway. You'll get a straight answer about what's up there, what it needs, and what it costs. Sometimes the honest answer is: your roof looks great.