Cedar is the default soffit on a good-looking house in this region, and on day one it wins — it is real wood and it looks like it. The question worth asking is not which one looks better in the driveway on handover day. It is which one you are willing to get a lift out for. A soffit is the hardest surface on a house to reach, and cedar is the one that needs reaching. Here is the honest comparison.
| ASA/PVC (SoffiWood) | Western red cedar soffit | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Foam-core PVC with a co-extruded ASA cap, tongue and groove. No wood in it. | Solid cedar boards, usually tongue and groove or V-groove, finished on site or pre-finished. |
| How it looks on day one | Consistent grain and colour board to board, six stocked colours. | Real wood — which means knots, and colour that varies between boards and between batches. For some people that variation is the whole point; for others it is a callback. |
| How it looks in year five | Colour is warranted for 15 years at Delta E under 5. Washing it is the maintenance. | Greys and darkens wherever it is exposed, unevenly. Getting it back means cleaning and re-coating, not touching up. |
| Upkeep | Rinse it. Nothing to sand, oil, stain or seal, ever. | Clean and re-oil or re-stain on a cycle — cedar suppliers themselves put it at roughly every one to two years for exposed work. |
| The part people underestimate | Nothing to reach. | Every re-coat is a ladder, scaffold or lift around the whole house. That labour, not the boards, is what cedar soffit actually costs over twenty years. |
| Water and mould | Nothing inside absorbs water, so there is nothing for mould to feed on. | Cedar is naturally rot-resistant, not rot-proof. Shaded soffits over damp ground, north elevations and anywhere with poor airflow are where it goes dark first. |
| Insects | Nothing edible and nothing soft to bore into. | Cedar deters insects, but carpenter bees and wasps still work soffits, and a nest gets found from the ground. |
| How it vents | A continuous black ventilation strip runs the length of the eave along the wall line, where the soffit meets the house. Against a warm colour it reads as a shadow gap separating the ceiling from the wall, and it carries around the whole building — see Sauble Beach, ON in Walnut. | Usually round vents punched into the boards, or a perforated strip added afterwards. Both are visible from the ground, and neither was part of anyone's design. |
| Putting it up | Light enough to hold a full board overhead one-handed while the first screws go in. Regular flat-head screws, no pre-drilling. | Heavier overhead, pre-drilling near ends to stop splitting, and more time spent aligning grain and colour across a run. |
| What it costs | More than builder-grade aluminium or vinyl soffit, and there is no recurring cost after it is up. | Standard grades start lower, clear grades do not, and either way the refinishing cycle keeps arriving. |
From soffit height, the tell with a wood-look board is repetition, not texture — the same knot pattern showing up every few boards. Ours is an embossed grain rather than a printed film, and the six colours read as wood tones rather than as painted plastic. That said, this is the one question you should not take our word on: get samples, hold them up under your own eave, and look at the completed installations on our projects page rather than at a swatch in a showroom.
Rot resistance is not the same as no maintenance, and it is not what usually goes wrong. What goes wrong on a cedar soffit is the finish: it weathers unevenly, the shaded sections go dark, and getting it back means access equipment around the whole house. If you are happy to run that cycle, cedar is a legitimate choice and we will tell you so. If the plan was to install it and never think about it again, that is not what cedar does.
It vents through a continuous black strip that runs the length of the eave along the wall line — the inner edge, where the soffit meets the house rather than out at the fascia. Two things follow from that. The first is that it does not look like a vent: instead of round holes punched through the boards, or a perforated strip screwed on afterwards, you get a shadow gap separating a warm wood ceiling from the wall, carrying around the whole building in one line. On the Sauble Beach house it runs in Walnut, and it is the detail people notice from the driveway without being able to say why — there are photographs of it at www.yjjnano.com/resource/soffit-ventilation-detail. The second is the part that matters to your inspector: ventilation is a code requirement with a number attached, so tell us the net free vent area the build needs and we will confirm it against the run before you order. Sorting that out after the boards are on site is how a job stalls.
Sometimes, and the way to find out is a photo plus two samples held against it in daylight. Cedar shifts colour as it ages, so what you are matching to is whatever the sun has already done to it rather than what it looked like new. Bring us the photo before you order rather than after.
A soffit sees less direct sun than a wall, but it does get reflected UV off the ground and the driveway all day. The ASA cap is the layer that holds colour and it is the same one we use on wall cladding, where the exposure is far worse — the 15-year fade warranty at Delta E under 5 covers both.
Nothing in the board absorbs water, so there is no moisture inside it to freeze, expand and open up cracks. That freeze-thaw cycle is what ages wood, and a soffit gets the worst of it: it is the surface that sits directly under the melting and re-freezing at the roof edge.
Our published rating is flame-retardant B1, and we will send you the report. Ask for the standard it was tested against, from us and from anyone else quoting you — a rating quoted without its standard tells you nothing. Untreated cedar is a combustible wood product, which matters more on a soffit than on most surfaces given where it sits relative to the roof.
You can, but you would be trading away the reason to buy it. The colour lives in the cap and is warranted for 15 years; paint over it and you are back on a repainting cycle, at soffit height. If you are unsure about a colour, look at it on a finished house first — we have installations across the GTA.
We supply, and we can put you with installers who have done a number of these. Material and labour are always quoted separately. Roofing crews tend to pick this up quickly because the fastening is simpler than cedar — screws, no pre-drilling, and each board hides the screw line of the one before it.
Yes, and for a soffit we would rather you did — colour reads very differently on a shaded horizontal surface than on a vertical wall in full sun. Ask for the two or three colours you are considering and hold them up where the boards will actually go.
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YJJNANO Materials Canada Inc.