Insulation is the trade most easily sold on vague promises. Comfort is subjective, savings are hard to verify after the fact, and the work disappears into an attic where nobody looks again. That combination makes it unusually easy to sell a homeowner something that does not address the problem they actually called about.
These guides are written to make that harder. Why a single room runs cold or hot and how to tell which of several causes is yours. Why air sealing and insulation are separate jobs, and why doing them in the wrong order wastes the money spent on both. And what ice dams are actually telling you about the attic above them, which is usually not what the gutter company suggests.
Almost every house has one. The back bedroom, the bonus room, the office over the garage, the finished basement corner. It runs colder in winter, hotter in summer, and no thermostat setting…
Read it →Insulation slows heat as it moves through solid material. Put enough of it between a warm space and a cold one and heat crosses more slowly. That is the entire mechanism, and it works well…
Read it →An ice dam is a ridge of ice at the lower edge of a roof, usually with icicles hanging off it and sometimes with water backing up behind it. It forms when heat escaping from the house warms…
Read it →Cold rooms, drafts, ice at the eaves, or an attic you have never been in. Any of it is a place to start.