Roof Maintenance: An Ounce of Prevention

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Benjamin Franklin

Entropy is the second law of thermodynamics. It states that with time, things go from order to disorder, and information that is complete will in time be lost. If you have a workshop you understand the struggle: if you don't constantly work to create order, your shop will be a mess.

The same goes for your body, your house, your car and even your computer. Your body needs constant care to slow down aging. Your home needs protection from the elements and from other abuse such as gravity, children and pets if it is to stay stable for years to come. A car must have new oil, grease and parts if it is going to last, and it also needs a driver who won't push it to the breaking point. A computer shows entropy on the information level very well. With time your files can lose information and become corrupted. Only by winding the clock back to an earlier state, when the information was still present, can you recover the lost bits. That gives you another chance to maintain your system, but if you drop the ball one day, you may suffer a crash.

Your roof takes the most abuse

The roof is the outside surface on any building that suffers the most abuse. Paint slows the breakdown of siding and trim by protecting the wood from UV rays and moisture. Caulking eventually fails and must be inspected every so often and, if necessary, removed and replaced. Electrical components can corrode much like a car battery terminal and its cables when different metals are used with fittings, which a professional typically prevents. Heating and cooling systems require filters, refrigerant, and possibly new switches or belts. Most of the home is in a slow decline. The foundation may settle after the first year and cause cracks in the drywall. Heavy snow loads can stress windows and doors so they no longer close correctly. Snow can also break roof trusses and ceiling joists, so a ceiling shows stress or cracks, and it can even collapse the whole roof.

The cure cannot be worse than the sickness

Most people who live with heavy winter snowfall understand the importance of removing snow from a roof when the inches pile up. Many take it upon themselves to rake the roof. We often find scrapes and holes in flat roofs after a customer hired someone to remove the snow load and now suffers massive leaks from the punctures. We have also seen newer shingles aged to near the end of their life because the homeowner hired someone to remove the snow, and in the process the granules that protect the base mat were removed.

In the attempt to do good, we cannot do more harm. We encourage homeowners to maintain their homes and property, but in trying to remove weight from the roof structure we don't want them to destroy their roof system. Our advice is to always instruct the person doing the snow removal to leave a few inches of snow. The little bit that is left won't do any harm. It's the other 20 inches that will.

Debris, gutters, and drains

Roof cleaning, or the lack of it, can also cause major roof issues, especially if your roof is under trees. Tree debris piles up and clogs critical waterways, so water dams up and finds new routes around the blockages. We have seen ice dam a valley so that the snowmelt had to crawl out of the valley 5 feet before it could continue on its way down.

Gutters are another path for water to leave the roof, and they often suffer debris and dirt buildup to the point that water cannot get out fast enough and freezes in the gutter. The awful result is a water dam that builds up along the eaves and causes massive leaks inside the building. A gutter full of ice under overhanging trees is a familiar sight to many homeowners in the Yakima Valley. Cleaning the gutters in the fall can drastically reduce the size of an ice dam or eliminate it altogether.

The same goes for flat roof drains. On one new roof install of ours, the section where we took a picture had been finished four days earlier. In that time we had some good rainfall, and the rain carried pine needles around the drain. Even though this type of system can be submerged under water, slow evacuation can cause major problems. Water levels can build up and, in this case, could run over the wall structure, which is unlikely but possible. The bigger issue comes in winter, when heavy snow begins to melt and the water cannot get away. It freezes into a heavy sheet of ice. The ice blocks more of the drain screen and raises the elevation around the drain, so new snowmelt flows away from the drain center. Now the roof is in serious danger if snowfall keeps adding weight beyond what the building structure can support.

Maintenance programs

At Yakima Roofing & Remodeling, LLC we have provided subscription plans for building owners to help solve these issues. By subscribing to any combination of the programs we offer, we can take the worry out of your roof system by keeping it maintained and cleaned. When the time does come that it can no longer be maintained, we will let you know before it becomes critical. We hope to give you plenty of time to plan and budget for a new roof long before you need one.

We also offer exterior home maintenance programs designed to help you keep the whole envelope of your home maintained. This service is a foundation-to-roof service that checks everything from soil drainage issues, foundation, caulking, windows, doors, siding, trim, paint, electrical, and decks and patios, and more.

The little things add up

I once saw a study in which people living in poverty said good quality food was so expensive that it was the reason they spent so much on fast food. The interviewer then asked whether they were taking any medications, and most said yes. When the math was worked out, the monthly prescription cost more than the healthier food that would have helped prevent the problem in the first place.

Homes fall into disrepair for the same reason: people believe they can't afford to fix the little things, and with time more little things break until the whole condition is worse. Driving through the Yakima Valley we often see a few shingles missing from a home, and they stay missing for years. The repair is very cheap to begin with, but over time water seeping in causes thousands of dollars in damage.

If you cannot afford a repair, don't be afraid to give us a call. We will try to find a way to help you keep it from becoming a bigger problem, and work with you to make the repair affordable.