Attic storage and insulation?

[Blacklisted]

Hello all, we just bought our first house and I have a couple questions about storage in the garage attic and insulating it. First off we are in East county San Diego CA so the coldest it gets is around freezing a couple times a year in the winter and it's around the 100 deg mark this time of year. My plan is to put OSB type surface on top of the rafters for storage of boxes etc. I plan on having 2-4 rafters covered and then leave one open for access and then 2-4 covered again. Eventually I want to finish the garage and insulate it, will this cause any problems when I do insulate the rafters down the road? I don't want to have to redo this when I finish the garage.

I can also get one of the solar attic fans for a good price, it's one of the US Sunlight brand that is a return from costco and will ventilate up to 1700sqft. My garage is only around 450sqft Solar Fan and it already has a vent on the roof and looks like this (not sure what kind of vent it is but theres no fan or anything.



Would I leave that vent in the roof and just add the solar vent or replace the vent with the solar vent? Right now there is only a couple of inlet vents on the side of the garage for replacement air.



I'm guessing that eventually when I close up the rafters I would have to put in soffit vents or something similar.

Is this a good game plan? The reason I want the solar vent is to get the majority of heat out of the garage attic. I know it will be replacing the air with hoter outside air but I think it will help keep the garage a little cooler. I think to see if it will make a big differance I will just take a box fan and put it up by the vent so it acts like the solar fan would to see if it will work or not.

Anyone have any better ideas or am I on the right path of thinking? Thanks in advance for all input and help on this.

Al

 

[csp]

Your intake air should be coming from the soffits, not the garage space.

 

[Highbeam]

You can't just decide to put storage in your trusses. Your trusses were designed for a specific load which most likely does NOT include your storage. Putting all your junk up there in that engineered system could cause saggage and even complete failure of the trusses. That would be bad.

I have seen this damage and have developed a peeve about people loading up the bottom cord of the truss not designed for it.

Even hanging sheetrock from the truss puts a load on it that must have been part of the design. When I built my shop, I had the trusses designed with a 10 lbs per square foot dead load on that bottom cord to allow me the use of the bottom cord for seiling weight and some well distributed storage above. This was a special design.