Insulating your home is of course the only way to make your home more comfortable during the extreme temperatures of the winter and summer months. An older gentleman that I worked with at one time on a project, that is an engineer and holds a PhD from Kansas University, put it simply, “Throw your money at insulating your home instead of throwing your money at the utility companies”.
The most important lesson I had learned, was that rather than assuming, to go around your home and check to makes sure that there are no air leaks or drafts coming from anywhere. The reason why I say this, is because although I had definitely made sure I sealed all leaks within my home, I assumed for some reason that the cover with glass doors on my fireplace was most certainly sealed rather well. Well, that’s what prompted me to write this article. I double checked it and discovered nothing but cold drafts coming from all around the outside edges where the screen meets the brick. Most of it didn’t fit flush against the brick. But you wouldn’t notice it unless you inspected more closely. I couldn’t believe it! How could I have overlooked this?! So I ran out to Home Depot, or “deep-ho” and bought some 42” foam cylinders that are are meant to seal gaps for window air conditioners. I inserted the foam in between the screen edges and the brick from the inside of the fireplace. Not visible at all and it did the trick. I doubt it’s “fire-proof”, but then again I don’t use my fireplace.
Another short story is an old house that I lived in that was always uncomfortable during the winter months. I thought I had done all I could in insulating it, but failed to do anything about the slight draft I could feel coming from all the aluminum framed windows. Six fairly large windows. So….from the inside of the house, I ran a bead of clear caulk in between the aluminum frame and the wooden sill. What happened? I was able to get my thermostat 7 degrees higher!! All from just caulking my windows?!
The thing is, you might not think that some small drafts here and there through cracks or gaps would make much difference, but when you add all those small cracks and gaps up, it can equate to basically a baseball sized hole or larger in your wall. During the winter, don’t you think your home would get cold pretty quick if I drilled a hole even the size of the quarter into your wall exposing your home to the outside elements?
Here are the most important areas to check:
1. Make sure you have insulation covering at least the height of the ceiling joists in your attic.
I had discovered in my home that the ceiling joists were actually only about 6-8 inches deep rather than the typical 12 inch. It was because the builder/owner went cheap when building my house decades ago. So I had about 4-7 inches of blown in insulation in my attic!! That’s it!! So about a year and a half ago, I laid R-30 unfaced insulation into my attic. It was a tough job, but it only took a weekend and about $250 to do. This is probably the most important thing to do to your house. During the winter months, heat rises to the ceiling. That’s the first place it wants to escape. The quicker it escapes through your ceiling, the less pressure it puts out against your walls. Thereby almost “sucking” cold air into the walls of your home. Once I did this, my home felt much more comfortable! During the summer months, the insulation resists the heat that builds up in your attic from entering into your home through the ceiling. So ceiling insulation makes a huge different during both summer and winter months. I have a couple areas in my house that have “pockets” that are attics aside from the main attic. One of the pocket attics happens to sit above a room in my house that runs a little cooler in the winter than the other rooms in my home. So I actually double stacked the ceiling insulation in that part. That might be considered a little excessive, but it helped just that much more!
2. Check your windows. If there is a draft in between the frame and the sill, run a bead of clear silicone caulk in between.
3. Check your fireplace screen! If you don’t use your fireplace, you might want to insert some foam inside areas of the screen from the inside. Or seal the gaps where the glass doors meet the screen.
4. If you have an unfinished basement, or there is a part of it that is unfinished, go and check to see if there are any drafts or gaps in between the framing and the foundation mud sill. I stuff some paper faced insulation in these areas of an unfinished storage room of my home.
5. Go around your house and check again!
Now one thing that I have not mentioned is: walls. The walls are the second most important area for insulation, with the attic being the first most important. So if you’ve done everything listed above to a great degree and you are having major troubles with heating and cooling, you might want to look into picking a room or two within your home that seems to have the most trouble and add insulation inside the walls. However, this just might not simply be possible for a lot of homes. Especially if you have an old home where instead of foam boarding, fiberglass was placed into the wall cavities of the house as insulation. Over the decades, the fiberglass loses its R value for obvious reasons: moisture, age, etc. If that’s the case, you’d pretty much have to tear out the drywall inside your house, or remove the outside siding from your house to get to and remove the fiberglass insulation and then refill the wall cavity with spray foam. Quite pricey of course! If you discover that your wall cavities are empty, it might a rather simple job to drill a 2 inch hole at the top of your wall from the inside or outside of your house and fill the wall cavity with blown in insulation. This can even be a job for the aggressive do-it-yourselfer.
This is why new homes of today heat and cool much better. They have foam sprayed into the wall cavities which offers superior insulation above any older home. That’s almost like taking the panels off the NASA space shuttle (resists extreme heat upon atmosphere re-entry) and putting that material into your wall cavities.