Columnists

Well it was messy, noisy and not particularly cheap, but I now have a well-insulated attic. I spent the morning at home yesterday watching as three guys from Greensaver, a green renovation company, headed up beyond our ceiling via a hatch in my bedroom closet to do their attic insulation work. They built sealed, insulated forms around electrical boxes, spray-foamed and boxed in the tops of walls, and blew in several centimetres of cellulose fill on top of everything, adding to the fibreglass and cellulose that was there before. When the guys emerged from our attic, in their respirators and coveralls, they were totally covered in dusty cellulose. Bits of it drifted everywhere.

But a few zips around the house with a mop (and, um, writing a cheque) are well worth the results: my attic went from R 19 to R 50, so it’s now more than double as effective at conserving heat — and protecting the house from the hot attic in summer. (Here’s some background on R value and insulation. Blown-in cellulose is ideal for attics because, when properly installed, you can get great coverage throughout the attic.) According to Greensaver, because of my small home’s general lack of attic vents, it could benefit from installing a couple of small vents one third of the way up the roofline so that moisture could escape a little better, and to help bring the attic temperature down in the summer.

While my partner and I could theoretically insulate the attic ourselves, it’s great to have the pros just come in and do the job well. Besides, we’re pretty busy doing other things, like renovating our basement. Not to mention the fact that our EcoEnergy Retrofit followup audit is in May. That’s when our auditor returns to the house 18 months after his first visit to evaluate the changes we’ve made to the tightness of the house (sealing drafts), the insulation level (in things such as exterior walls, the attic, basement walls, and windows and doors) and to our utilities (our water heating and space heating and cooling equipment). We’ll receive government rebates for the changes we’ve made.

Are you hoping to add insulation to your home?

If you’ve ever done a home renovation project, you know that the project you intend to complete isn’t the one you need to start with.

For example, my partner and I would like to add additional insulation to our attic, so we can make sure we’re using as little energy as possible to heat our home. The attic currently sports a messy mix of fibreglass batts and cellulose. According to our energy audit the level of insulation there only amounts to R 19.9 (R level is a measure of insulation value), whereas the EcoEnergy program recommends R 50.

That project will involve us calling in some help in sealing tops of walls with foam boxes and blowing in more cellulose insulation. But first, before we can do any of that, we have to replace the bathroom vent, and make sure it’s vented it outside. You see, the existing bathroom vent, which is mounted over the bathroom in the attic, isn’t well sealed, and it wasn’t properly vented either, so it spewed warm, moist air into the attic. Yesterday a roofer came by to install a roof vent for the bathroom fan. Excited by the upgrade, my partner decided we should connect our existing bath fan to the roof vent right away. So off to the home centre we went. Half an hour later we had all the insulated ducting, tape and fittings to do the job, and thanks to my partner’s handiwork, the fan is now vented outdoors.

So now we can get on with the business of insulating the attic!

Well, after we have a look at the electrical…

Have you added insulation to your home lately, or are you trying to plan the job?