Early Detection of Roof Leaks

Some­thing that almost no one ever inspects until there is a prob­lem is the under­side of the roof. Most houses have an attic space that gives us access to the under­side of the roof.

But why should we inspect the attic space; why should any­one crawl around a dirty, dusty attic just to look around? To answer that ques­tion, I will first ask another. Would you rather have to hire some­one to replace only the shin­gles or would you rather have to hire some­one to replace the shin­gles, roof sheet­ing, dam­aged drywall/ plas­ter and any­thing else affected by water damage?

By inspect­ing the attic space peri­od­i­cally we can detect small leaks in the roof a lot sooner and greatly reduce the chances of them becom­ing bad enough that they start allow­ing water to ruin the drywall/ plas­ter, insu­la­tion, trim, fram­ing, floor­ing and any­thing else inside the house. By the time you notice water leak­ing into the liv­ing area of your house a lot of dam­age that you can’t see has already been done and the total cost of the repairs may have dou­bled or tripled.

I recently inspected the attic area of a house look­ing for all pos­si­ble causes of a leak. I had already taken care of an ice dam on the edge of the roof that I was sure was the cause of the leak but to be thor­ough I wanted to get into all of the attic spaces and be sure that no other prob­lems were present as well.

The attic space where the ice dam was located was part of a sin­gle story roof and it was right up against the wall of the sec­ond story. This area of the roof was in per­fect shape and there were no signs of water dam­age or damp­ness on the under­side of the roof. So the leak must have been trav­el­ing down the wall of the house to the ceil­ing instead of through the roof.

The wall in ques­tion was a wet wall (a wall hous­ing most of the plumb­ing for a bath and/kitchen). I wanted to be sure that the water wasn’t com­ing from around a bad pipe boot or from a pipe itself so I checked the attic space of the sec­ond floor to make sure that the water wasn’t com­ing from the main vent pipe. The area where the pipe went up through the roof turned out to be dry and I couldn’t find any other indi­ca­tions that the water was com­ing from the pipes.

But as I was com­ing back through the attic space I noticed sev­eral dis­col­ored spots on the under­side of the sheet­ing of the sec­ond story roof. I inspected them a lit­tle closer and dis­cov­ered that a cou­ple of them were actu­ally damp. This area of the roof was nowhere near the area that the leak inside the house had occurred but it was a cause for con­cern because this was the main roof for the whole house.

These damp spots on the under­side of the roof had not become bad enough to allow water to reach the liv­ing space of the house, but that was only a mat­ter of time.

I informed the home owner of my find­ings and rec­om­mended that the roof be replaced as soon as pos­si­ble to avoid any more water dam­age to the rest of the house.

So you can see from this exam­ple how an inspec­tion of the attic space can be invalu­able in deter­min­ing whether or not there is a prob­lem before the issue gets to the inte­rior of the house.

The con­di­tion of the shin­gles look­ing at them from the roof didn’t indi­cate that there were any imme­di­ate prob­lems (I had been on the roof a cou­ple of months prior to this), but once I was allowed access to the attic I could see where water was begin­ning to get through the shin­gles and stain the sheeting.

On note on water spots in the attic space; water stains on wood will not go away. A water stain alone is not enough infor­ma­tion to assume that your roof is indeed leak­ing unless you are sure that the water stain is a new one or the water stain is damp when you inspect it. I have inspected attics before that showed signs of water stains but the water stains were left over from a time before the exist­ing roof was installed.

This is where a peri­odic inspec­tion of the attic space and doc­u­ment­ing the find­ings of that inspec­tion really come in handy.

To deter­mine if a water stain is a prob­lem I will inspect the stain either dur­ing, or directly after, a heavy rain­fall to see if the stain becomes damp. If the stained area remains dry it is more than likely an old stain that was caused before the roof was replaced or repaired.

In order to keep track of water stains in an attic space I may take pho­tographs of the affected area, trace the out­line of the stain with a marker and date the dis­cov­ery of the stain. This makes dis­cov­er­ing a new stain or leak much eas­ier and less time consuming.

Over all, this gives a small win­dow of oppor­tu­nity to sched­ule a roof repair or replace­ment and do what you can to pre­vent the water from dam­ag­ing any­thing else in the house (Such as lay­ing out plas­tic and/or a con­tainer tem­porar­ily to catch the water before it dam­ages your insu­la­tion and drywall.)

So, if it takes you five to ten min­utes to inspect your attic space and you make an inspec­tion once a month is it worth those one to two hours per year of your time if it could poten­tially save you hun­dreds or even thou­sands of dol­lars? Not to men­tion the stress and aggra­va­tion of deal­ing with water pour­ing into your liv­ing area.