Attic insulation is one of the best-kept secrets to making your home more energy efficient in both winter and summer. The less work your heating and air conditioning system has to do the less it will cost you to control the temperature in your home.

               

The reasoning behind this is simple:

In the winter your heating system is pumping warm air into each room in your home. Obviously, you want to keep as much of that heat in the room as possible. However, everyone knows that heat rises. If your home has a second floor and the heat goes up there, that’s fine – it is still useable warm air. However, if the only thing above your living area is your attic you don’t want the heat to rise up to that area – that is just heat that is wasted. If your attic insulation is inadequate you will certainly lose some heated air, which is a direct loss.

In the summer the outside temperature is quite warm and your AC system is working to keep each room in your home cool. What is almost always the hottest location in the house? The attic, of course (if you doubt that get a stepladder and pay a quick visit to your attic in August – you probably won’t stay there very long!). So if your air conditioner is trying to keep all of the living areas of your house cool you definitely don’t want all of the hot air from the attic radiating down and warming that air.

This is where your attic insulation comes in.

If your attic currently does not have any insulation you can definitely benefit from this process. If your attic already has some insulation you still may be able to benefit. To check this; measure the thickness of the attic insulation itself. If you have loose-fill fiberglass insulation and the thickness is less than about 12 inches you could use additional attic insulation.

(Without getting too technical - attic insulation is measured as an “R-Value”. The per-inch R-Value of loose-fill fiberglass insulation is 2.2 to 2.9. So if you measured 12 inches of thickness multiply that by the R-Value and it comes up to an R-Value range of 26 to 35. That is a little low. To be ideally insulated, you want to have an R-Value of at least 38 or as much as R-49.)

As a homeowner you don’t have to worry about figuring out all the formulas and calculations to see if you have enough attic insulation. We are the experts in this area and we do this type of work every day. We can come out and do a complete assessment of your attic insulation and let you know if it is lacking in any way. We see a wide variety of situations – some attics are fine and others are costing the homeowner a lot of money in terms of wasted energy. Of course, the assessment performed by our trained heating and cooling service technician is completely free and you are under no obligation to purchase any products or services. So you have nothing to lose and you may learn some valuable information about your home and the degree to which it is energy efficient.

One other important note – many of the attics that we see don't have finished flooring. In order to move about the attic you would need to balance as you move from one ceiling joist to another. We do not recommend this! There are hundreds of people each year that get injured because they were trying to walk about their attic and they ended up losing their balance and falling through the ceiling. Either spread some thick plywood across the joists for easier movement or let us handle moving around in the attic.