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?
