Am I gonna melt a snowy roof?
- Thread starter Dojo
- Start date
ahhhavalanche!
Member
it depends on how big and how well insulated your roof is. 1000w will produce a lot of heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. If your attic is well insulated the heat will just build up in there and heat up your house (while reducing the ability of the air flow to cool the light). If your attic is not well insulated the heat will leave through the roof and walls, melting the snow on the way out. The total heat will be divided by the surface area that the heat can escape through, if that number is too high it will melt the snow.
sanjuan
Member
Living near Seattle, I started to rot my roof decking doing that. (Truss structure, insulation over the room ceilings.) Constantly exhausting the attic with a big fan cured the problem.
Hope you have lower ambient humidity.
Over the years around here, some buildings (barns, garages) with big grows have been busted because of "weird" snow melt.
Out of curiosity, I look at my neighbors' roofs after it snows.
Hope you have lower ambient humidity.
Over the years around here, some buildings (barns, garages) with big grows have been busted because of "weird" snow melt.
Out of curiosity, I look at my neighbors' roofs after it snows.
Squire5683
Member
Personally, I run my lights from 12am to 12pm... This is the coldest part of the day... Itll keep your cooling to a minimum. I dont think one 1000W will make a noticeable difference on a house attic. I vent mine under my house, and it actually keeps my heating for my house down to a minimum, but I have 6000W running during the night. Use the weather to your advantage. Summer too... 12am-12pm is the coolest time as well.. Right now I have 5000W running from 12am-12pm, and I dont have any ac running... I just bring in the cold air via a 6" Vortex and exhaust the room through a 10" vortex and carbon filter. Good luck!!
I
Iron_Lion
best way to catch a grower is to be a grower, i always look for signs of grows when i drive thru neighborhoods in the winter or look for oddly placed dryer vents.
I vent in to my attic even tho I know its not the best way, I think the best set up would be to suck air from the attic and vent in to the house. This thread reminds me that I will have to check my attic at some point.
bLacKtHuMb
New member
nothing wrong with being paranoid
White Tee
Member
fishheadbob
Member
More info gets a better answer... Assuming your attic is uninsulated the hot moist air is going to do something. If your attic is uninsulated and also well vented, then most of the air will blow out the vents and not melt the snow. That's a lot of venting for most places. More likely that you have little ventilation, so yeah, in addition to slowly rotting and fungussingup the wood up there, your neighbors with similar houses will wonder wtf you're up to melting all the snow when the same thing doesn't happen to them. No matter. you gotta get the air out.
toastfighter2
Active member
Like squire said, you best bet would to run it at night, and use the extra heat it produces to your benefit. Buy a cheap door(I am assuming your closet has a door that can be removed and stored) at lowes, cut a hole in it, and blow the hot air out into a room. Hide the hole with a vent grill if need be, and two 90 degree elbows make a pretty good light trap.
Your cloths dryer exhaust lights up a FLIR too.
Im all about a tin foil hat, but IMO a lot of you guys are over thinking this. My house has terribly inadequate insulation and single pane casement windows. It leaks heat like sieve.
Unless the exhaust is getting your attic over 75F, i dont see a problem. They dont know the layout of your house, you could have an extra bedroom up there (or just poor insulation). If your roof is 80F and all the others in the neighborhood have snow on them, then yeah youve got a problem.
Im all about a tin foil hat, but IMO a lot of you guys are over thinking this. My house has terribly inadequate insulation and single pane casement windows. It leaks heat like sieve.
Unless the exhaust is getting your attic over 75F, i dont see a problem. They dont know the layout of your house, you could have an extra bedroom up there (or just poor insulation). If your roof is 80F and all the others in the neighborhood have snow on them, then yeah youve got a problem.
C
CFL_Grow
Haha. I always melt the snow off my roof from buring the woodstove all winter. Cept' the blizzards.. Then it try's to melt off and just makes a foot of ice on the roof that i have to chip off. Had ice spikes from the gutters to the ground last year.
Sometimes I really have to hand it to some of these growers and the ingenuity they have.
However other times I suspect that some people just smoke too damn much...
I use to live near Seattle. I didn't grow back then but several friends of mine did. One guy lived over on Queen Ann hill and he dug a shallow ditch out about 20 feet from the corner of his house where his room was. He dropped in a chunk of drain pipe w/ a 90 on the end and buried it, replanted his lawn and bought one of those igloo shaped dog houses to set over the end of the vent pipe and wrote "Killer" in bright red letter above the door. I don't recall if he ever did actually get a dog or not but nobody ever looked inside the doghouse.
Back in those days I owned a tree service and topped trees for a living. But times change, I'm older now and I have learned the errors of my youth.
Most houses build in the last 50 years have several substantial vents built into them during construction. I bet that not many people know that?
It's true though. At least in the USA and Canada. Nobody ever notices those 3 and 4 inch pipes sticking out of the roof or going up the sides of homes and buildings. They are sewer vents. With out them septic and sewer systems won't work because shit needs to flow downhill. Well if you stick the end of a straw and plug the end it creates a vacuum and doesn't drain.
How many times has anybody ever seen a cop smell the end of a sewer vent to see if it smells like weed? Nobody ever even pays any attention to those vents when they are blowing hot steam from showers, clothes washers/dryers or heating furnaces that have to vent steam.
Look at your roof and locate the biggest pipe penetrations. Usually they aren't even capped because they just allow air into the sewer system, but if it is capped check it first because the cap could be a one way vent called a Studor vent. Studors only allow air to pass in 1 direction, in, so you will need to go up and swap it for a "China cap" type vent cap and a piece of hardware cloth to keep out bugs and birds.
However other times I suspect that some people just smoke too damn much...
I use to live near Seattle. I didn't grow back then but several friends of mine did. One guy lived over on Queen Ann hill and he dug a shallow ditch out about 20 feet from the corner of his house where his room was. He dropped in a chunk of drain pipe w/ a 90 on the end and buried it, replanted his lawn and bought one of those igloo shaped dog houses to set over the end of the vent pipe and wrote "Killer" in bright red letter above the door. I don't recall if he ever did actually get a dog or not but nobody ever looked inside the doghouse.
Back in those days I owned a tree service and topped trees for a living. But times change, I'm older now and I have learned the errors of my youth.
Most houses build in the last 50 years have several substantial vents built into them during construction. I bet that not many people know that?
It's true though. At least in the USA and Canada. Nobody ever notices those 3 and 4 inch pipes sticking out of the roof or going up the sides of homes and buildings. They are sewer vents. With out them septic and sewer systems won't work because shit needs to flow downhill. Well if you stick the end of a straw and plug the end it creates a vacuum and doesn't drain.
How many times has anybody ever seen a cop smell the end of a sewer vent to see if it smells like weed? Nobody ever even pays any attention to those vents when they are blowing hot steam from showers, clothes washers/dryers or heating furnaces that have to vent steam.
Look at your roof and locate the biggest pipe penetrations. Usually they aren't even capped because they just allow air into the sewer system, but if it is capped check it first because the cap could be a one way vent called a Studor vent. Studors only allow air to pass in 1 direction, in, so you will need to go up and swap it for a "China cap" type vent cap and a piece of hardware cloth to keep out bugs and birds.
