Today, we are going to discuss with you what we feel you need to know before insulating your attic. Insulating your attic will improve air quality, it will improve efficiency, and also make your house more comfortable.
First of all, this is staggering. Did you know that the Department of Energy says that a properly insulated attic could improve or save you between 10 to 50% of your heating bills every year? Is that not nuts?
We’ve seen this time and time again. We’ll go into an attic and there’ll be that much insulation and they’re walking around in hoodies and all that kind of stuff. What we want to do is we want to give you some tips that you should think about before even insulating the attic and also explain to you some of the different methodologies in insulating your attic.
- Air Sealing the Attic
Number one, make sure that if you’re going to go through all the expense of insulating your attic, air seal all the major penetrations in the attic floor. This is all of the heating and air duct penetrations, all of the exhaust vent fan penetrations.
If you’ve got a water heater, then it’s got the piping going up through the attic. You’re going to need to get some fireproof caulk and build a dam around that to make sure that the insulation doesn’t burn. You want to make sure that you’re air sealing all of those chases and your attic hatches and all of that stuff.
If you’ve got one of those big monster fans that’s in your hallway that they installed back in the ’70s and ’80s to to ventilate the house, We recommend you just yanked that dude out and seal all that guy up and to air seal it properly and redo that drywall. That should take care of most of the air loss from your living space up into your attic. This should go without saying, but obviously you want to make sure that you take care of all roof leaks.
If you get up there and you see matted insulation or insulation that maybe looks like it might have debris or different things like that, you could be getting water from the roof leaking or from your gable vent. Whenever we did our attic, we had two gables, obviously. It was a shotgun style attic, so you had two gables.
Well, one side, one gable was taking on all this blowing rain. When we got up there to suck out all that old insulation so that we could air seal the of the attic, we discovered there was mold all over the drywall. The snakes can easily get into that space. You want to make sure you air seal those gables if you find out that they’re letting water come in because you don’t want to blow in insulation or put batting down or whatever down there only for that insulation to get wet and ruined in the future.
- Mold Problem due to Less Ventilation
Another big mistake that we see people not doing. As a matter of fact, we’ve had quite a few people call us that they had developed a mold problem after they hired a contractor to blow in insulation because they didn’t make sure the attic was properly ventilated.
There’s two types of ventilation, there’s active and passive.
- Active ventilation would be installing solar attic fans or some kind of active ventilation that comes on when the temperature gets to a certain point.
- Passive ventilation is where you have maybe the gable, the soffit and the ridge vent.
That way during the convection process, when the attic gets really hot, it starts to move air from the soffit up through the ridge vent. The only problem is they didn’t put baffles in to make sure that those soffits didn’t get clogged. If you’re going to pay somebody to put batting insulation in your attic or blow in insulation, if they don’t have those soffit vents open for air flow, it could create a mold problem.
- Plywood Storage
Another big mistake we see people doing is that they will have all this plywood down so that they can store their Christmas trees and old photos and things up in their attic. Well, guess what? If you’ve got plywood directly on a piece of two by four, you’ve only got about three inches of insulation if they even insulated underneath the plywood at all.
Get all that plywood out of there and stop using your attic for storage. If you’re concerned about comfort and energy loss and all that kind of thing, try to find another place to put those items. We know that’s a big expense, but anyway, that could hinder the amount of insulation you’re able to install because of all of the plywood that you’ve got for storage.
- Understanding the Types of Insulation
So we’ve got two different types of insulation. We’ve got batt insulation, which is the rollout insulation, and then we’ve also got loose-fill insulation. Most of the time contractors will install loose-fill insulation. It tends to do better and lower attics where you have more obstacles to work around and all that because you can just blow it around that stuff.
Now, the batt insulation tends to be more of a DIY project because it’s easier to utilize and manage and you don’t have to rent a machine. You can just buy the batting insulation and throw it up. We want to talk about three different types of loose-fill.
The one we personally like the best is the fiberglass, because it’s naturally fire retardant. It tends to be about the same in cost. The R-value is about an R-2 per inch. It’s really good and clean. It tends to be less dusty than some of the cellulose and rock wool items that we’ve seen.
But the advantage of rock wool is that it has a chemical treatment that can cause pests not to want to nest in it and things like that. A lot of your pest control companies will blow in only rock wool. They only blow in cellulose. That’s the only kind of insulation they’ll use because a lot of people will call pest control companies to do the insulation after they’ve had a raccoon infestment or mice or rats or things like that. Obviously, you don’t want to have a litter box over your house.
One of the things you can do if you’re going to use either cellulose or fiberglass is make sure you seal all of those penetrations around the attic to keep pests and different things from climbing in a. It’s called exclusion. You can create an exclusion zone all around the attic to stop that. The last one that we come across very little in our area is rock wool. From what we understand about rock wool is it tends to be more expensive than the other two and it’s just harder to get ahold of in certain areas. Typically most people in our area is going to use either loose-fill fiberglass or cellulose.
As we mentioned before, fiberglass is our number one choice. Now, if you’re going to use a batt style insulation, then you’ve got four choices. You still have fiberglass, you still have cellulose, you still have rock wool, but they’ve also got some cotton fiber insulations out there. If you’re going to tackle this project on your own little bit at a time, then you may decide that using a batt insulation is easier for you to work with and you don’t have to rent a machine, especially if you’re just doing this a little bit at a time.
Most of the time getting those machines for a few hours can be costly and all that, even though it tends to go faster. But remember, don’t do any of that insulation until you’ve air sealed the floor of the attic. You don’t want to take all that time and blow in R-38 or R-49 of insulation and then have to suck it all out because you’ve realized that you made a mistake.
Make sure that your air sealing first. The other thing you want to do is if you’re in a really cold climate, you need to have at least an R-49. Then if you’re in a warmer climate, you can get away with less. In a temperate climate like maybe Tennessee, you want to go with at least in an R-38. That’s about 13, 12-13 inches of insulation would be R-38. The colder, if you’re up in Minnesota, you want to go a lot thicker. If you’re down in Florida, you don’t have to go quite as thick, but air sealing is still just as important no matter what your climate is to stop drafting and all that sort of thing.
- Getting Rid of Bad Insulation
As we mentioned before, you may want to get rid of bad insulation. If you’ve had rain come in through the gables or you’ve had some kind of roof leak or something like that, make sure you get yourself an insulation vacuum and suck out all of that bad stuff. The bad thing about wet insulation is, number one, it’s not really that effective. But number two, it’s kind of hard to get out. It’s really tough. It can cake up and all that sort of thing.
Make sure that if you’ve got a lot of caked up insulation up there, especially that cellulose, can you imagine wet paper, how difficult is that to get out of an attic? If you’re going to take the time, don’t just blow good insulation on top of bad insulation. Make sure you invest and get all of that batt insulation out and then air seal the attic.
Lastly, if you live in a part of the country that offers energy credits, either through your local municipality, your power or things like that, TBA used to do stuff like that, they don’t really do it anymore, but if you’re in some of those high energy states, like probably California over on the West coast, up in Washington, Oregon, even up in New England, they may have energy credits that can help you get a bonus or a rebate on that insulation that you install.
There are many professional attic insulation and duct cleaning service providers. Make sure you check out their reviews if you live in Round Rock, Texas. We hope this was helpful for you. Before you tackle that attic insulation, make sure you take a look at all those steps and we hope you make it a happy and blessed day.
