Before Winter Hits, Ensure Your Home’s Insulation Is Adequate

Our Lake Erie winters bring frigid temperatures for extended periods, so effective insulation is essential to ensuring a comfortable winter season for your family. Examine your attic insulation yourself, before cold weather sets in. Or, have a professional energy evaluation conducted in your home before the coldest months arrive, to assess insulation in the attic and elsewhere.

Insulation Inspection

When examining your attic insulation, look at the attic floor. The floor joists should not be visible between the insulation layers.

The most reliable approach to assessing the reliability of your existing insulation, and to identifying needed replacements and supplementary insulation, is to have a qualified technician conduct a thorough energy evaluation to pinpoint areas of your home where heat loss is occurring due to inadequate insulation. The expert also will look at heat loss from air leaks, which is a separate issue from how well your insulating materials are resisting heat transfer. HVAC professionals are heavily scheduled during winter months, so it’s prudent to have a timely examination of your home’s insulation as part of a comprehensive energy evaluation during the fall.

Thickness of Insulating Materials

The U.S. Department of Energy recommendation is for 13-16 inches of attic insulation. Loose fiberglass, fiberglass batting or cellulose insulating options are recommended for effective retention of heating in cold weather and keeping out heat during the cooling season.

R-Values

Appropriate R-values for attic insulation in our Midwest region are between R-49 and R-60. This means that if your attic currently has 3 to 4 inches of insulating material thickness, you need to add enough to increase your R-values to the recommended R-value range.

Types of Insulating Materials

It’s not necessary to use the same kind of insulating materials that you currently have in place. For example, you can roll out blanket insulation atop existing materials.

Since insufficient insulation can impact your family’s comfort and excessively increase your energy bills, assess each room in your home for to ensure that all insulation issues affecting your home’s energy efficiency can be fully addressed.

Please contact us at Stack Heating & Cooling with questions for our experts regarding your home’s insulation, or to set an appointment to have an energy evaluation this fall.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Cleveland, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).  For more information about insulation and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

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