Insulating attic pull-down stairs

I am Neymar's with conservation tips you know we spent a lot of money heat and cool our homes and if you want to think about energy efficiency you want to think in terms of air loss so today on tips we're gonna take a look at one of the biggest offenders of this the attic pull downstairs now of course you find a lot of pull downstairs in the garage now we're utilizing the attic space for some storage we're optically sure heating the garage austin's through that they're not a big problem but when you have inside the home like this then we got something we got some issues first off your best way to take care of the matter is to make sure that this cover fits nice and tight to the frame a lot of times the springs will get loose over the years and you may have to put like a barrel bolt or something to latch it here make this nice and tight if it's kind of Gaby you can also put some other stripping up there take care of the losses but the biggest problem of course is above this hatch here and snares themselves okay first step to making an insulated cover for this stairway of course is again in the attic and find out what our measurements might be now you want to inspect the area around the attic stairs make sure it's nice and level had to add some plywood there so the box that we're going to have will fit nice and snugly on that we're going to use two inch styrofoam it's locally available it's very good it's light weight high r-value easy to work first thing we need to do though is to get our measurements in order to do that you got to have a trusted assistant over fold the stairs up for you and I mean trusted because they gotta let you back down to okay this is what they look like when they're folded up in the Attic build a box around it we've got these Springs sticking up here so we have to accommodate the box for those but basically what you do is share the rear rough opening here with a stairs fit in and make a measurement there 25 write that down so 25 on the width in terms of the length we got 54 and a half 54 and 1/2 and the height that we're going to use we want to clear that spring about 12 inches so that box is going to be 12 inches high understand about 25 wide about 53 this way okay I'm ready to cut this is good now choosing is a 2 inch blue board because it gives you a really high r-value for the you know for the material you're going to purchase now if you have a really great detailed drawing of what the box is going to look like and take that down to the lumberyard you won't like to be able to get them to cut it but they're nice saw pieces that'll be easy enough for you to get home if you don't have that possibility it's very easy to take a handsaw and slice through this like buttah wrap we got our final piece cut ready to put it into place we want to go ahead and use an adhesive to glue pieces together when using silicone caulk today hundred percent you might use silicone adhesive you basically get a nice good bead of caulking along the edges along with the top is going to fit the edge and on the other edge here then when you put the piece in place - hold it there while the caulking is dry use some three inch nails poke it right through the styrofoam that way it'll make a nice tight juncture that way now the next thing is to bring the box up into the attic and see how it fits see how lightweight it is easy to move now of course we've set up our perimeter area nice and flat we want to have a spot where we can delete and lean this on so as you're coming up the stairs you know we've got some place to put it I'm going to try and see how well it fits looking pretty good we got enough room I can make them a little bit wider and longer so that we get a little wiggle room to play with if we have any problems with say gaps along here well there's a variety of weather stripping that you get a hardware store and most times this stickum is going to six to the bottom of the box here take care of any gaps and then we might have a little novelty it's like a light switch might be on the way here you just take a razor knife cut that out and customize it for the patina for the position that it's in so you can also add more insulation to this if you this is an ar-10 right here we can get a little bit more our value by adding more insulation you know it's nice and lightweight easy to handle so not only going to save on your heating bill but you're going to save on your cooling bills because the heat in the Attic can really affect the temperatures in depth in that room below so that's the way you stop your air losses through your attic stairway i'm de maras conservation tips so get busy

Channel: Columbia Water and Light

Views: 89,753

Rating: 4.7441077 out of 5

Keywords: AtticStairwayInsulatedCover

Id: 4mGCZNpkQ3w

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 19 2013