Things To Know Before Insulating Your Attic | Improve Comfort

hey Michael Church crawlspace ninja and basement ninja and today I'm going to discuss with you what I feel you need to know before insulating your attic insulating your attic will improve air quality it will approve improve efficiency and also make your house more comfortable so you want to make sure you do it right stay tuned okay 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 that means that most people have a very very uninsulated attic and we've seen this time and time again we'll go into an attic and there will be that much insulation and you know they're walking around in hoodies and all that kind of stuff so 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 number one make sure that if you're gonna go through all the expense of insulating your attic air seal all the major penetrations in the attic floor this is all of the the heating and air duct penetrations all of the exhaust vent fan penetrations if you've got a water heater then it's got you know the the piping going up through the attic you're gonna 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 all that is done properly you want to make sure that your air sealing all of those chases and your attic hatches and all of that stuff and if you've got one of those big monster fans that's in your hallway that they've installed back in the 70s and 80s to to ventilate the house I recommend you just yank that dude out and seal all that guy up and and the air seal that properly and redo that that a drywall and that should take care of most of the air loss from your living space up into your attic okay so this should go without saying but obviously you want to make sure that you take care of all roof leaks now believe it or not not everybody thinks about that 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 okay whenever we did our attic we had two Gables obviously it was a shotgun style attic so you had two Gables okay well one side one gable was taken on all this blowing rain so when we got up there to suck out all that old insulation that so that we could air seal the floor of the attic we discovered there was mold all over the drywall it was a great place for snakes to get in and different things like that so 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 or put batting down or whatever down there only for that insulation to get wet and ruined in the future 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 have developed a mold problem after they hired a contractor to blow in insulation because they didn't make sure the attic was properly ventilated okay so there's two types of ventilation there's active and passive active inhalation 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 and I'm sorry the soffit and the ridge vent so 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 is they didn't put baffles in to make sure that those soffits didn't get clogged so if you're gonna 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 so make sure you invest in that as well okay 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 2x4 you've only got about three inches of insulation if they even insulated underneath the plywood at all so 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 and I 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 okay so we've got two different types of insulation we've got batt insulation and which is the roll-out 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 this because you can just blow it around that that stuff now the bad 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 so I'm going to talk about three different types of Louisville the one we personally like the best is the fiberglass okay because it's naturally fire retardant it tends to be about the same in cost the r-value is about an r2 per inch so you know it's it's really good it's clean it blows in clean it tends to be less dusty [Applause] then some of the cellulose and rockwool items that we've seen but the advantage of rock wool is that it has a chemical treatment that can you know cause pests not to want to nest in it and things like that so a lot of your pest control companies will blow in only Rockwell that's all they use I'm sorry only cellulose 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 investment or mice or rats or things like that obviously you don't want to have a litter box over your house so one of the things you can do if you're gonna 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 it's called exclusion so 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 wall okay so from what I understand about rock wall as it tends to be more expensive than the other two and it's just harder to get a hold of in certain areas so typically most people in our area it's gonna use either loose fill fiberglass or cellulose and as I mentioned before fiberglass is our number one choice now if you're gonna use a bat style insulation then you've got four choices you still have fiberglass you still have two cellulose you still have rock wall but they've also got some cotton fiber insulation Zout there so if you're gonna tackle this project on your own a 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 you know 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 you know our 38 or our 49 of insulation and then have to suck it all out because you've realized that you made a mistake so 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 r49 okay and then if you're in a warmer climate you can get away with less and a temperate climate like maybe Tennessee you want to go with at least in our 38 so that's about 13 12 13 inches of insulation would be our 38 so 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 okay so as I 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 and 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 I can cake up and all that sort of thing so make sure that if you've got a lot of caked up insulation up there especially that's cellulose I mean can you imagine wet paper how difficult is that to get out of an attic so if you're gonna take the time don't just blow good insulation on top of that insulation make sure you invest and get all of that bad insulation out and then air seal the attic and 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 TVA 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 so my name is Michael church with crawlspace ninja I hope this was helpful for you before you tackle that attic insulation make sure you take a look at all those tips and I hope you make it a happy and blessed day and we'll see you later the Christmas lights feel the city there are people everywhere snow is falling white and fruity [Music] as eyes

Channel: Crawl Space Ninja

Views: 88,310

Rating: 4.7523222 out of 5

Keywords: Things To Know Before Insulating Your Attic, do i need attic insulation, spray foam attic floor, attic insulation diy, What should i do before insulating my attic, attic insulation installation, attic insulation baffles, attic insulation removal, attic insulation spray foam, attic insulation batts, attic insulation blown, attic insulation done wrong, attic insulation removal diy, energy efficient, home insulation spray foam, home insulation 101, hot attic solutions

Id: ao8KnAgTbfo

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 12 2019