There’s a particular kind of dread that you feel as a homeowner when you notice a wet spot forming on your home’s ceiling or walls. At first, you probably tried to ignore it, hoping it was a mark left by something else. But once you realize it really is a wet spot … and it’s getting bigger … you know you need to figure out where it’s coming from and how to stop it.
Finding the Source of Your Roof Leak
Unless you’ve been through this before, most homeowners naturally expect that the wet spot on their ceiling is located directly underneath the problem spot in their roof or a leaky pipe. It’s a natural mistake to make — we all understand how gravity works, so the assumption is that the water drips directly down from the source onto the surface below and through the ceiling. In most cases, though, that isn’t actually how things work. Small roof or pipe leaks can allow in a very small amount of water that can travel along beams, pipes, walls, and even wires before finding a spot to pool and collect, eventually leaking through and creating the spot you see on your ceiling. Don’t start administering DIY repairs immediately above your ceiling’s wet spot — that likely isn’t the right place, and you might cause more problems than you solve.
How Roof Leaks Land on Your Ceiling
Although gravity certainly plays its part in the movement of the water from the roof to your ceiling, water will always follow the path of least resistance as it moves from one place to another. If water is coming in underneath your shingles, it then probably travelled along the underside of the roof, along rafters and beams, and possibly down wires or drywall before running into an obstacle like a nail, a wall, or a light fixture and being deposited at a spot that eventually becomes the wet spot you see on your ceiling.
How to Find the Real Source of Your Roof Leak
As roofing professionals with tons of experience handling roof leaks, we don’t start at the wet spot and work backwards (in some cases, we’d have to tear your entire ceiling apart to find the source of the leak if we did it that way). We start with your roof, and work our way down. There are some common “trouble spots” that are our first suspects when a homeowner detects a wet spot on their ceiling or walls: joints and flashing around chimneys, skylights, and roof valleys are always the first place we check if you suspect a roof leak. (Here in the Cincinnati area, the flashing around older masonry chimneys in the Clifton and Walnut Hills neighborhoods is a common culprit as the source of some of these small roof leaks.) From there, our detective work will usually take us into your attic, to see if we can detect where the water is coming in from the underside of your roof. If we can find and patch the roof leak, we don’t necessarily need to understand the whole path the water took to get to your ceiling — we can make the needed repairs and move on.
How to Be Your Own Roof Leak Detective
If you want to try to get to the bottom (actually, the top!) of your ceiling’s wet spot, you’ll have to track the roof leak to its source. Here’s how:
- Start your detective work after a moderate to heavy rain (AFTER, not during; it’s too slippery on a roof during a rainstorm, and too hard to hear the dripping of water in your attic while there’s a steady downpour outside).
- Use caution if you plan to get up on your roof or into your attic — watch your step and have a buddy with you.
- Keep things quiet — it can be hard to see water droplets if it’s a very small leak, but you might be able to hear the drip, drip, drip …
- Follow the wetness upward to its likely source.
- Look for telltale signs: if you can’t find the water, look for mold, mildew, or rust as giveaway signs that water is present where it shouldn’t be.
Stop Playing Detective and Call the Experts
Think about it this way– even if you manage to find the source of the leak, you’re probably going to need professional help to patch it, right? So you’re better off calling your trusted, local roof repair expert to help you find and truly fix the problem. We can find the source of the water, determine how bad the damage is, and make the necessary repairs — all without you having to climb up on a roof or poke around in a musty attic. We’ve got decades of experience tracking down and repairing roof leaks, from major to minor (and a tip — the minor leaks don’t stay minor if you don’t have them fixed). Give us a call here at Harper Siding & Roofing and let us put our advanced roof leak detection skills to the task. We’re a top roof leak repair company in the Cincinnati region, and we’re ready to find and repair any leaky spots in your roof today!