Roof, Wall, Soffit & Sidewall Dryer Vents in Brooklyn: How Configuration Changes Everything

We are Vent Pro NYC, a Brooklyn dryer vent cleaning crew, and the single most useful question we ask a new customer on the phone is not "how old is your dryer" or "when was it last cleaned." It is "where does your vent exit the building." The exit point — what installers call the termination — decides almost everything about the job. How long the run is, how many elbows, where the lint settles, how fast it clogs, whether a bird can move in, whether we can reach it with a 24-foot ladder or need to crawl out a roof hatch with a harness. It even decides the price. A wall-vented condo in DUMBO and a roof-vented brownstone in Park Slope have the same dryer, the same lint, and the same code on paper. They are not the same job.

Most customers do not know what kind of termination they have, and that is reasonable. The dryer end is right behind the washer. The other end is somewhere outside the wall, the roof, or buried in a soffit. By the end of this piece you will be able to identify your own termination from the sidewalk, predict roughly how the cleaning is going to go, and recognize the four configurations we see go wrong most often in Brooklyn. General background on the borough's venting reality lives in the complete Brooklyn dryer vent cleaning guide; this piece zooms in on the part most customers cannot see. Our deeper code post is the NYC building code piece on Brooklyn dryer vents, and we will reference IRC M1502 where it matters.

The four main dryer vent termination types

In Brooklyn residential buildings, your dryer's exhaust is going to exit the structure in one of four ways. There are exotic configurations — through a chimney chase that vents to a roof cricket, through a window pane on a temporary basis, through a basement wall into a window well — but ninety-five percent of what we see falls into one of four categories.

Termination	Where it exits	Typical run length	Where we see it	Access for cleaning
Wall (sidewall)	Exterior wall, usually 4-inch louvered hood	8 to 20 feet	New condos, ground-floor apartments, garden-floor brownstones	Easiest. Brush-and-vac from inside, inspect cap from outside. 45-60 min.
Roof	Up through the roof deck or out a parapet, with a dryer cap on top	25 to 60+ feet	Three- and four-story brownstones, row houses with upper-floor laundry	Hardest. Ladder, roof hatch, sometimes harness. 90-180 min.
Soffit	Horizontally through the underside of an overhang	10 to 30 feet	1990s-2010s renovations and additions	Awkward. Often requires opening a soffit panel. 75-150 min.
Gable	Through the gable end of a pitched-roof attic	10 to 25 feet	Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Mill Basin single-family	Generally straightforward. 60-90 min.

The termination type is not a stylistic choice. It is dictated by where your laundry room is. Basement or ground-floor washer, the duct almost certainly exits through the closest exterior wall. Parlor or second-floor laundry, the duct has to go up to the roof. Kitchen-laundry combo tucked under a renovated dormer, probably a soffit termination. Each configuration has its own failure modes, its own cleaning approach, and its own pricing.

From the sidewalk, a wall vent looks like a 4-inch round or square hood, usually painted white or grey, mounted on the building face. A roof vent is invisible from the ground in most cases — a black or galvanized cap on top of the roof, typically 8 to 12 inches tall. A soffit vent is a small round or square louvered grille on the underside of an overhang. A gable vent is mounted high up on the triangular end of a pitched roof.

If you are standing on the sidewalk and you cannot see any obvious dryer cap on the building face, your vent is almost certainly going up to the roof or out through a soffit. Look up.

Wall vents (most common in Brooklyn apartments)

The wall vent — also called the sidewall termination — is the simplest and most common configuration in newer Brooklyn apartments, condos, and ground-floor units in older buildings. The duct runs horizontally from the back of the dryer to the closest exterior wall, where it exits through a 4-inch louvered hood. The hood typically has a single spring-loaded flapper, sometimes a louvered bank of three or four small flaps that open with airflow.

In Brooklyn, you see wall vents most often in 2000s and newer condo buildings in Williamsburg, DUMBO, and Downtown Brooklyn, in ground-floor and garden-floor apartments in brownstones, in 1940s-1950s row houses in Bay Ridge, Sheepshead Bay, and Bensonhurst, and in two-family buildings where each unit vents out its own exterior wall.

The advantages are substantial. The run is the shortest of any configuration, typically 8 to 20 feet, which means the dryer's blower is operating closest to its design assumptions. Usually one elbow, sometimes zero. The cap is at human height or close to it, so we can inspect, clean, and replace it with little or no ladder work. We brush and vacuum the duct in 45 to 60 minutes on a clean job, and verify airflow with an anemometer the moment we are done.

The downsides are real but manageable. A wall vent at sidewalk or first-floor height tends to deposit a small drift of fine lint on the sidewalk or planter beneath it. Customers notice a grey-white film on their flower pots in summer and assume it is dust from the street. Nine times out of ten it is their own dryer lint. The other downside is that a low wall vent is an attractive entry point for animals — mice, squirrels — if the flapper is damaged or missing. We get calls in February about scratching noises behind the dryer that turn out to be a deer mouse colony in the last 4 feet of ducting.

The most common wall-vent quality problem we encounter is a flapper stuck open. Lint gets caught around the hinge, the spring corrodes, or a previous owner removed it to "improve airflow." A flapper missing entirely is an open invitation for nesting wildlife — see the bird nests piece. If you are in a Williamsburg condo or a Park Slope garden floor, this is what you have, and cleaning falls at the lower end of our pricing range. See the Brooklyn dryer vent cleaning cost guide for dollar figures.

Roof vents (most common in brownstones)

The roof vent is the most common termination in Brooklyn brownstones, and it defines our work most days. The duct exits the laundry room — usually on the second, third, or parlor floor — goes up through a chase, a closet, a stair wall, or an old chimney column, and terminates either through the flat roof deck with a vertical dryer cap, or through a parapet wall with a horizontal cap mounted on the parapet face.

The vertical roof cap is a cylindrical or square hood about 8 to 12 inches tall, with a hinged top damper. The parapet cap looks more like a stretched-out wall vent — mounted on the vertical face of the parapet, sometimes invisible from the sidewalk because it sits below the parapet edge.

You see roof vents in 1880s-1920s brownstones across Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights, in pre-war apartment buildings where in-unit laundry was added later, in three- and four-story wood-frame row houses in Sunset Park and Bay Ridge, and in most upper-floor laundry retrofits anywhere except the basement.

The advantages are about aesthetics and neighbor relations. The exhaust is high above pedestrians, well away from windows, and not depositing lint on anybody's sidewalk planter. The cap is invisible from the street, and there is no flapper at face height for animals to push past.

The disadvantages are the entire reason we charge more for this job. The run is long — typically 25 to 50 feet, occasionally 60+ feet on a parlor-floor laundry in a four-story building. Long runs mean more elbows, more friction loss, lower effective CFM at the dryer. The 2,021 CFM nameplate on a high-end dryer in the lab becomes maybe 400 CFM at the drum on a 50-foot roof run with three elbows. We cover this in detail in the brownstone long vent runs guide.

Long runs mean more places for lint to accumulate. Lint deposits at elbows, at transitions, at any horizontal stretch where airflow slows below about 1,200 FPM, and most heavily in the last 6 to 10 feet before the cap, where the warm moist exhaust hits the cold steel of the cap interior and condenses. In a 50-foot roof run we routinely pull 4 to 9 pounds of lint out, half of it from the top 8 feet.

Roof vents are a magnet for bird nests. Brooklyn has large populations of starlings, house sparrows, and pigeons that see a 4-inch opening with warm exhaust as real estate. If the damper is stuck open even slightly, a starling will move in within 48 to 72 hours during nesting season. We have removed entire nests — sticks, fabric scraps, dryer lint, eggshells, sometimes live chicks — from roof terminations on jobs where the homeowner thought they had "a slow drying problem." See the bird nests piece.

Access is where roof vents get hard. To clean from the cap end — which is mandatory, not optional — we need to physically reach the cap. On a three-story brownstone with a flat roof, that means either a 28-foot extension ladder from the back yard, or a roof hatch from inside the building. Roof hatches in Brooklyn are often original, last opened during a roof replacement, sealed by paint, located inside a closet on the top floor. We have spent 45 minutes negotiating a hatch before we even start cleaning.

A roof-vent clean is a 90-to-180-minute job, not a 45-minute one. If somebody quotes you a flat $89 for a brownstone roof run, they are either not going to the roof or not actually cleaning the run.

We work from both ends: feed a rotary brush from the dryer end up the duct, then climb to the cap and brush down or vacuum from the top to capture what the brush dislodges. The bottom-only "shop-vac at the dryer" approach a lot of chain franchises use does nothing useful past the first elbow on a long roof run. It is theater.

Soffit vents (the controversial one)

The soffit vent is where customers get hurt. It is the configuration with the highest rate of bad installations we see in the field, and the one where the difference between a code-compliant install and a moisture disaster is sometimes a single 8-inch piece of duct.

The basic idea is reasonable. A soffit vent terminates the dryer duct horizontally through the underside of a roof overhang. The cap is a small louvered grille mounted flush with the soffit panel. The duct runs from the dryer, up or sideways into the soffit cavity, and out through that grille.

This is code-compliant under IRC M1502.3, as long as two conditions are met:

1. The duct must terminate through the soffit to the exterior. The duct must physically connect to the cap. The exhaust must exit the building.
2. The soffit must not be a return air path. If the soffit is part of the attic ventilation system, dumping moist warm dryer exhaust into it defeats the ventilation and saturates the insulation.

Both conditions are commonly violated. The version we see most often is the contractor who runs the dryer duct up into the soffit cavity, points it roughly toward the soffit grille, and stops there. The duct ends 6 to 18 inches short of the cap. The dryer exhaust at temperature carries 1.5 to 2.5 pounds of water per load. That water hits the cold underside of the roof deck, condenses, and runs down into the wall cavity, the insulation, and the top plates. Over a single winter we have seen this destroy ceiling drywall, rot top plates, and grow black mold on the underside of plywood roof sheathing.

We see this in 1990s-2010s Brooklyn renovations more than any other failure mode. Customers describe a new stain on their kitchen ceiling and a sweet musty smell after running the dryer. They assume the upstairs neighbor leaked. We open the soffit panel and find a dryer duct dangling in the cavity, the underside of the roof deck black with mold. The fix is to extend the duct, seal it to the cap, and remediate the cavity — a $1,500-$3,500 job depending on cavity damage.

The second common soffit failure is the cap. Generic soffit grilles — the ones used for attic ventilation — have insect screens behind the louvers. Lint sticks to the screen mesh, builds up, and within 12 to 18 months the screen is solid felt and the cap is dead. First symptom is long drying times. Second is an overheating dryer. Third is sometimes a fire. The IRC explicitly forbids screens at dryer terminations, but generic soffit caps with mesh are sold at every big-box store and installed by general contractors who do not know the rule.

The right soffit cap for a dryer is a dedicated dryer soffit vent — a louvered grille without mesh, with a spring-loaded damper, sized 4 inches round. We carry these. Sometimes we swap a mesh-screen attic-style cap for a proper dryer soffit cap and the dryer immediately drops drying time by 30%. When installed correctly — sealed duct to the cap, dedicated dryer cap with no mesh, spring-loaded damper — a soffit termination is a perfectly reasonable configuration. We are not against soffit vents. We are against the way most of them are installed.

Look up at your soffit vent. If you can see any mesh or screen through the louvers, that cap is wrong for a dryer. Get it replaced before the next service.

Gable vents

Gable terminations are rare in Brooklyn because flat roofs dominate. Where we see them is in single-family homes with pitched roofs — Bay Ridge above 80th Street, Dyker Heights, Mill Basin, parts of Marine Park and Manhattan Beach. Some are 1920s-1930s wood-frame houses with traditional pitched gables; some are 1950s-1960s ranches and split-levels with shallow gable ends.

A gable vent exits high up on the triangular end wall of an attic, between the eaves and the ridge. It is typically a 4-inch round or square louvered hood. From the ground, it looks like a small medallion high on the building's end face.

The advantages are underappreciated. The run is short — often 10 to 20 feet from a second-floor laundry — because the duct goes straight up through a chase, through the attic, and out the gable without the elbows a flat-roof termination forces. The cap is exposed to wind from one direction, which keeps it dry and prevents the rain-blowback problems we see on flat-roof caps in Brooklyn's harbor wind.

Access for cleaning is generally straightforward. We can typically clean a gable-vented system in 60 to 90 minutes. The one disadvantage is that the duct passes through the attic, which is cold in winter. If the duct is not insulated, warm moist exhaust meets cold steel and condenses, creating wet lint that packs and clogs. A vapor-tight insulation wrap on the attic run solves this. We do this as an upgrade on a fair number of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights jobs.

The four configurations gone wrong

Pulling together the failure modes from each section above, here are the four configurations we see go wrong most often in Brooklyn. If you have any of these, you should get it inspected — not necessarily replaced, but inspected so you know what you are dealing with.

1. Soffit vent that terminates inside the soffit cavity

The contractor ran the duct up into the soffit and stopped short of the cap. Exhaust dumps into the cavity. Moisture condenses on the roof sheathing. Mold follows. The most expensive single failure mode we see, because by the time it is identified there is usually structural damage. Fix: open the soffit panel, extend the duct, seal it to the cap, remediate the cavity. Cost $1,500-$3,500 depending on extent. Diagnostic signs: moisture stains on the ceiling adjacent to the soffit, musty smell after running the dryer, or visible icicles forming under the soffit in winter.

2. Roof vent capped with insect screen

The cap has mesh behind the louvers. Lint plugs the mesh within 12 to 18 months. The dryer overheats, drying times double, and the lint trapped against the mesh becomes a slow-burn fuel source. We pull these caps off and find felt-like mats of lint a half-inch thick. Fix: replace with a code-compliant dryer cap that has a spring-loaded damper and no mesh. $75-$250 depending on access. We will not deliver a roof-vent clean without verifying the cap is mesh-free, because cleaning a duct on a cap that will clog itself again in 14 months is wasted money.

3. Wall vent at sidewalk level with a damaged flapper

The flapper is stuck open, missing, or hinged so loosely it does not seal. Cold winter air pours into the back of the dryer. Mice find the opening in late fall and walk straight in. By February the last 4 feet of duct is a mouse colony. Fix: replace the cap with one that has a working spring-loaded flapper, plus clean the duct (which by now has droppings and chewed insulation in it). $200-$400. Catching it before the wildlife arrives is much cheaper than after.

4. Wall vent on a windward facade in Bay Ridge

The subtlest failure mode. The dryer is wall-vented onto the harbor-facing facade of a Bay Ridge or Dyker Heights house — a wall that faces the prevailing southwest wind off the Narrows. On windy days, wind pressure on the outside of the cap exceeds the dryer's static pressure, and the flapper cannot open. The dryer runs, but exhaust does not exit. The dryer overheats. Drying times double or triple on windy days.

The fix is often a re-route of the duct, or a different style cap that handles wind pressure better (some recessed wall caps are designed for windward facades). We diagnose with an anemometer, comparing airflow on a calm day to a windy day. A 50% drop is a clear sign. A re-route ranges from $400 to $1,200 depending on what the duct path allows.

How configuration changes the cleaning approach

The reason we ask about termination on the phone is that the cleaning approach genuinely differs. A "dryer vent cleaning" is not one job — it is four different jobs that share a name.

Wall vent cleaning. Brush and vacuum from the dryer end. Inspect the cap from outside, replace if worn. Confirm airflow with an anemometer. Typically 45 to 60 minutes. Lower end of the price range.

Roof vent cleaning. Work from both ends. Feed a rotary brush from the dryer end up the duct; vacuum from the top to capture what the brush dislodges, or brush down with a second tech feeding from the bottom. Inspect the cap on the roof, replace damper if stuck. Confirm airflow at the dryer end. Typically 90 to 180 minutes depending on access. Roof access is often the longest single time component — sometimes 30 minutes of setup for 60 minutes of cleaning.

Soffit vent cleaning. Brush and vacuum from the dryer end. Verify the duct actually terminates at the cap, not in the cavity — this often requires opening a soffit panel from below (15 to 30 minutes, with a small drywall patch afterward). Inspect the cap, replace if it has mesh or the damper is stuck. Typically 75 to 150 minutes.

Gable vent cleaning. Brush and vacuum from the dryer end. Inspect the cap from outside on a ladder. Check duct insulation in the attic for condensation damage. Typically 60 to 90 minutes.

These ranges assume the duct has not gone several years without service. A 5-or-7-year-overdue duct adds 30 to 60 minutes because the lint is compacted, sometimes wet, sometimes mixed with bird nest debris or rodent material that has to come out by hand.

Cap and hood replacement

Caps and hoods do not last forever. Plastic ones — the white louvered hoods on suburban-style wall vents — have a useful life of about 10 years before UV exposure makes them brittle and the flappers crack. Metal ones — galvanized or aluminum — last 15 to 25 years, but corrode at the hinges and the damper goes stiff.

We carry standard replacements in the truck:

• Standard 4-inch louvered wall hood in white or brown, with a spring-loaded damper, for sidewall terminations.
• Dryer-specific roof cap with a spring-loaded damper and no insect screen on the lint path. Many generic roof vents sold at big-box stores are designed for bathroom or kitchen exhaust and have insect screens that are illegal for dryer use under IRC M1502.3. We use only the dedicated dryer style.
• Soffit dryer cap — a louvered grille without mesh, with a spring-loaded damper. Replaces the generic attic-style soffit grilles we routinely find on dryer terminations.
• Replacement spring-loaded flappers for caps that are sound but have a broken damper. Cheapest swap.

Pricing runs $75 to $250 depending on access and material. The lowest end is a flapper swap on a reachable wall vent during a cleaning visit. The high end is a full dryer-specific roof cap replacement on a parapet that requires a ladder setup on the roof itself. We include cap inspection in every cleaning visit, and if a cap is on its last year of useful life we say so and quote the swap as an optional add-on. We do not insist on swapping caps that have life left in them.

Bird guard or no?

This question comes up on almost every roof-vent job. The customer asks if we can put a screen on the cap to keep birds out. The answer is a careful no, with an alternative.

IRC M1502.3 explicitly forbids screens on dryer exhaust terminations. The rule exists because lint sticks to mesh and turns the screen into a clog, which causes overheating and fires. Cleaning crews who add mesh "to keep birds out" are creating the next fire hazard while solving the current bird problem.

The right answer for bird and rodent prevention is a spring-loaded flapper that closes fully when the dryer is not running. A properly seated flapper is impassable to a sparrow, a starling, a mouse, or a squirrel. Birds cannot push it open from outside because the spring is set against them. If you do have a bird problem, the cap is failing in one of three ways: the flapper is stuck open from old lint, the spring has lost tension, or the cap itself is loose and birds are getting in around it. All three are solved by cap replacement or repair, not mesh.

The customers who get into trouble solve a one-time bird problem with a quick wire-mesh add-on, forget about it for two years, and then call us about a dryer that takes three hours per load. We pull the cap off and find the screen choked with lint. Full pattern is in the bird nests in Brooklyn dryer vents piece.

The right bird guard for a dryer vent is a working flapper, not a screen. If the cap is doing its job, the flapper is the only guard you need.

Pricing for cap and hood replacement

Here is where our pricing typically lands on cap and hood work. Numbers are inclusive of material and labor and assume the work is done during a regular cleaning visit. Standalone cap swaps run a little higher.

• Flapper-only swap on a reachable wall vent: $75-$120. The cap stays, only the moving part is replaced. Under 15 minutes if access is easy.
• Full wall hood replacement on a sidewall vent: $120-$200. New louvered hood, new flapper, sealed to duct and wall.
• Soffit dryer cap replacement (swap mesh-screen cap for proper dryer cap): $125-$200. Sometimes requires opening a small soffit panel from below.
• Roof dryer cap replacement, flat roof, hatch access: $175-$275. Ladder setup, removal of old cap, new dryer-specific cap with proper flashing.
• Roof dryer cap replacement, parapet access: $200-$350. Higher end if a second ladder is needed on the roof or harness work is involved.

The cap itself is rarely more than $30 in material. The price reflects access — ladder setup, parapet climb, hatch negotiation, time. If somebody quotes you a flat $50 cap swap on a brownstone roof without seeing the job, they are not actually going to the roof. See the Brooklyn dryer vent cleaning cost guide for the broader pricing picture.

A real configuration walkthrough

To make this concrete, one job from last fall in Park Slope. Three-story brownstone, parlor-floor laundry, customer called because drying times had crept up over two years and the most recent load took 110 minutes for what used to take 55.

We pulled the dryer from the wall, disconnected the transition duct, and looked up with a borescope. The first 8 feet were clean. The first elbow had moderate buildup. The vertical run was mostly clear. The borescope told us the duct was not catastrophically full. The problem was up top.

We went up via the customer's hatch — sealed by paint, needed a putty knife to break — and walked to the rear corner. The cap was the original galvanized hood, about 20 years old. The damper was stuck open with a half-inch of lint built up around the hinge. Behind the damper, in the throat of the cap, was a partial bird nest. Old, dry, compacted. Sticks, dryer lint, fabric scraps.

We pulled the cap, cleared the nest by hand, brushed the last 3 feet of duct from the roof down, then went back inside and brushed the rest from the dryer end up. Total: two pounds of compacted lint and a quart of bird nest material. We re-seated the cap, confirmed the flapper now closed fully under spring tension, and ran a five-minute test cycle while checking airflow with an anemometer. Before the clean: roughly 1,100 FPM. After: roughly 2,400 FPM. The customer ran a normal load that evening and it dried in 52 minutes.

Total time on site: about 2 hours and 15 minutes. Most of that was roof access and nest removal. Actual brushing was 30 minutes. The takeaway: "drying times creeping up over two years" was a roof-cap problem, not a duct-fill problem. A wall-vented unit with the same dryer would not have had this problem, because there would have been no roof cap, no nest, and no two-year creep. The configuration is what made the problem possible.

FAQs

How do I tell what kind of dryer vent I have if I cannot see anything obvious from the street?

Trace the duct from the back of the dryer. Through the wall behind the dryer, exits within a few feet: wall vent. Up through a closet or chase: roof vent (or soffit vent if your building has eaves). Into an attic: possibly a gable vent. Then go outside and look. Wall vents are at ground or first-floor height. Roof vents are usually invisible from the sidewalk. Soffit vents are small grilles on the underside of overhangs. Gable vents are high up on triangular end walls. If you still cannot tell, send us a photo of the back of your dryer.

Is a roof vent worse than a wall vent?

Worse for cleaning, yes. Better for other things — no lint on the sidewalk, no animal entry at street level, no neighbor complaints. A roof vent costs more to maintain because the run is longer and the access is harder. But it is not inherently a bad configuration. Brownstones have roof vents because brownstones have no realistic alternative.

My contractor put a soffit vent in during a renovation. Should I be worried?

Worried, no. Inspected, yes. We see soffit terminations go wrong frequently enough that we recommend an inspection on every renovation-era soffit vent. Verify the duct physically connects to the cap (no gap in the cavity), and the cap has no insect screen. If both check out, the configuration is fine.

Can I add a screen to my roof cap to keep birds out?

No. IRC M1502.3 forbids screens at the termination, and the screen will become a fire hazard within 12 to 18 months. The right answer is a working spring-loaded flapper that closes fully when the dryer is off.

Why does my wall vent leave a grey film on the sidewalk?

Fine lint that escapes the cap during normal operation, deposits on the wall below, and washes down with rain. Not a malfunction — a sign the vent is working. If you have planters under a wall vent you may want to move them.

How often should I clean a roof-vented dryer in a Brooklyn brownstone?

Annually for roof-vented brownstones, slightly more often for heavy laundry households (multiple loads per day, pet bedding, towels). Wall-vented condos can sometimes stretch to 18 months if the run is short and use is moderate. Detail in the complete Brooklyn dryer vent cleaning guide.

Can I switch my roof vent to a wall vent to make cleaning cheaper?

Sometimes, but the cost of the switch usually outweighs many years of cleaning savings. Re-routing a dryer duct from a parlor-floor laundry to a sidewall exit is a major construction project. Budget $2,500 to $6,000 for a serious re-route. For most homeowners it is not worth it.

Why does my new high-end dryer take just as long as my old one?

Because the duct is the bottleneck, not the dryer. Modern high-capacity dryers are calibrated for short, clean runs in lab conditions. Put one on a 50-foot roof run with a clogged cap and the airflow at the drum drops well below nameplate. Clean the duct properly and verify cap function before assuming the new dryer is the problem. See the brownstone long vent runs piece.

Do you replace caps and hoods, or only clean ducts?

Both. We carry standard replacement caps in the truck for sidewall, roof, and soffit terminations. If we find a cap at end-of-life during a cleaning, we quote the swap as an optional add-on. We will not clean a duct that has a code-violating cap (mesh on the lint path) without telling you first.

My soffit vent is leaving a stain on the underside of my eaves. What is happening?

The duct may not be terminating at the cap. Exhaust is dumping moisture into the soffit cavity and finding its way out through the soffit panel itself, leaving a stain. Get it inspected before the moisture finds the roof deck and starts on the framing.

When to call

If you cannot tell what configuration you have, if your drying times have crept up, if you see staining near a soffit, if your wall vent flapper is stuck open, or if you simply have not had the system cleaned in a few years — call us. We will walk the system, identify the termination type, identify any failure modes, give you a fixed quote on the spot, and clean it correctly the same visit. Most jobs are one visit. Cap replacement is usually same-visit. Soffit-cavity work that requires opening a panel sometimes needs a return trip, and we will tell you that up front.

We are Vent Pro NYC. Small crew, we answer our own phone at (718) 541-5567, and you can book online at /book. We cover Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, DUMBO, Downtown Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay, Marine Park, Mill Basin, and the rest of the borough. Neighborhood notes live on the Park Slope page and the Bay Ridge page. If you have a roof vent, a soffit vent, or anything you are not sure about, that is exactly what we do.