Painting different parts of your house can be a great way to quickly refresh the look of your home. However, there are some things on your exterior that should never be painted. One of these is vented soffit panels.
What is a soffit?
Soffits are areas of a building that face downward. In residential construction, soffits are usually found under eave overhangs. If you step outside your front door and immediately look straight up, odds are that you’ll see a soffit there.
Historically, soffits were made from wood panels. Today, most new soffits in Canada are made from painted aluminum. (There are some markets in the U.S. that still primarily use painted wood soffit panels!)
What are soffits for?
Soffits serve two practical functions:
Close off the roof cavity so that rodents, insects, and other pests can’t get inside.
Allow a certain amount of airflow in order to properly ventilate the roof cavity
As you can see, these two jobs contradict one another! Any extra ventilation could risk more pest infestations, and better pest blockage could impede airflow. Poor ventilation in the attic can lead to a number of problems, such as ice damming, attic frost, condensation, and mold growth.
In our opinion, vented aluminum soffits are a great solution: you get full coverage of the open eave while the small vent holes across the panel allow for plenty of air flow.
So, why can’t I paint aluminum soffit?
Vented aluminum soffit allows airflow with hundreds of tiny perforations: if you paint these you will severely reduce the amount of air that can flow through these holes. In some cases, you might eliminate the airflow completely.
Check out these photos to see what we mean:
The photo on the left is a vented aluminum soffit panel right from the factory. The photo on the right is one that was painted over after installation. Here’s a close-up of the same images to give you a better sense of the difference between the two:
As you can see, the soffit panel on the left has small holes on either side of the perforation that allow air to flow through, but are still small enough to not allow insects to enter the roof cavity. On the right hand side, we can see that the extra layer of paint has filled the openings of the perforations, and this soffit panel is no longer allowing any ventilation to speak of.
There are paint companies out there that will offer to “refresh” your vented soffits for you. They’ll promise you a great new colour for around half the price of getting new factory painted materials. What these painters don’t realize is that they’re creating a huge problem for their clients down the line.