Insulating the attic is essential for each maintaining your house with ease heat and cool. During the wintry weather months while we’re trying to preserve the home heat, we consider attic insulation and whether greater insulation would assist. What we every so often overlook is the essential position attic insulation performs in supporting maintain the home cool at some stage in the hot summer season months.
Insulating the attic is one of the maximum value impact measures you could do to preserve comfort, conserve energy, and shop money. The warm air your heating machine produces and the cool air your A/C presents likes not anything better than to get away via our attics.
If you’re having a bit trouble keeping cool this arctos cooler summer season without running your A/C machine 24 hours a day, don’t forget about the opportunity that the primary retrofit you should practice is to add attic insulation.
Throwing in attic insulation will not necessarily produce the consolation, strength savings and decrease software payments that you’re seeking out. Like the whole lot else within the domestic retrofit business, simplest doing it right will produce a success results.
Here’s 8 pointers to including insulation and being a success at maintaining your private home cool.
1. Air Seal the Ceiling First:
Insulation slows the transfer of heat from one side of the insulation layer to the opposite side. That’s excellent, the warm air on one aspect takes a long time to skip through the insulation and blend with the cold air on the opposite side. Insulation is right at slowing down warmth transfer, but now not so right at slowing down air currents, mainly if the air is pushed thru the insulation due to stress difference, stack effect, or the winning wind.
Once air currents bypass through the insulation, a number of the insulation price is lost. The insulation can not do the activity it became designed to do. Before insulating the attic, make sure to air seal the holes inside the ceiling. Air seal the ones ceiling penetrations made by plumbers, electricians, HVAC, and chimneys.
2. Pre-Wire the Attic for Current and Future Technology:
I have been in many attics and visible the insulation destruction that takes region when every satellite dish installer, smartphone enterprise connector, net issuer, security expert, and exterminator gets performed on foot and crawling via the attic.
These human beings handiest care approximately getting you established, they don’t care approximately your insulation. Once 6 guys with boots have march round up there and flattened all that fluffy, free fill, blown in insulation, you do not have very many R-values left.
If you’ve got a chance, pre-cord the attic and be ready for technology. If installers from the net must access the attic, inform them to leave it like they discovered it. If you compressed it, fluff it again up earlier than you leave.
3. Provide attic ventilation:
Believe it or not, an attic needs to breath. Otherwise, it turns into an oven. I’m positive you already know what I’m talking about, you’ve got revel in the oven affect numerous evenings in your lifetime.
It works like this:
It’s a shiny sunny day and the warm rays of the sun beat down on the roof all morning and all afternoon. The attic space gets heat, then it receives hot, then it gets blazing. About four PM within the afternoon, the blazing temperatures in the attic begin to radiate via the ceiling and upload heat to the living location. As the sun is going down, the house simply maintains getting hotter and hotter.
Outside temperatures are cooling off a chunk, you open the windows and doorways, however the attic keeps cooking. With ice water beside your bed and a fab, damp washcloth over your brow, you try and get to sleep.
City Building Departments will inform you how a great deal ventilation you should have to your attic. They will say you need so many square ft of open attic air flow for each a hundred cubic toes of attic space. My recommendation is to provide more attic ventilation than the minimum advocated.