Cold that arrives on the wind behaves differently from cold that simply sits outside. Homes on the benches take a great deal of it, and it finds every place where an attic was never sealed at its edges. Add the fact that many Weber County houses were insulated once, decades back, by whoever owned them then, and never revisited since, and you have the situation we run into most in Ogden: material still up there, quietly doing less than anyone assumes. Call 801-644-9000 to be connected with contractors who work these houses.
Loose insulation is not a windbreak. When air enters at the soffit and runs across the top of the material, it strips heat out of it, and if the material is light it gets pushed back away from the eaves entirely. Homes with more exposure see this sooner and worse. Look toward the outside edges of your attic and you will often find the insulation thinned out, mounded up a foot or two in from the wall, with bare framing beyond it. That bare strip sits directly above the ceilings of the rooms along your exterior walls.
The remedy is not only more material. Baffles in each rafter bay keep incoming ventilation air in a channel above the insulation instead of driving through it, and blocking at the top plate of the exterior wall keeps material from being shoved around. Both are inexpensive compared with the insulation itself, and both get skipped when a job is priced on depth alone. If your lot is exposed, ask specifically what the contractor plans to do at the eaves, and whether the existing baffles, if there are any, are still standing.
Insulation does not announce that it has stopped working. It settles, it compresses, it gets walked on, and it slowly loses the trapped air that made it useful in the first place. Batts installed decades ago often shrink back from the framing and leave a gap along every joist. Loose material can look like a full attic from the hatch and be a fraction of its original depth out toward the edges. None of that appears on an inspection report, and the only symptom inside is rooms that never quite hold a temperature.
There are things you can watch for yourself. Uneven snowmelt across the roof, frost on the underside of the sheathing on a cold morning, dark staining on the surface of the insulation where air has been filtering through it, and daylight visible at the eaves are all worth reporting to whoever comes out. So is any sign of rodents, which ruins material quickly and argues for removal rather than adding over the top. A contractor who climbs into the attic and comes back with specifics is far more useful than one who quotes from the driveway.
Ice at the eaves forms when snow on the upper roof melts, runs down to the cold overhang, and freezes again. The melting comes from heat leaving the house into the attic. That is why dams are treated as an insulation and air sealing issue rather than a roofing one, even though the damage shows up as water in a ceiling or ice tearing at the gutters. Winters here supply plenty of snow to work with, and a house with a warm attic will make dams year after year, usually in the same spots.
Two things reduce it: stopping heat from getting into the attic at all, and keeping the attic cold with balanced ventilation once it is there. Sealing comes first, since venting a leaky attic mostly moves more warm air through it. Look at the usual sources, which are the attic hatch, recessed lights, bath fans that terminate in the attic instead of outdoors, and the chase around the furnace flue. If you already run heat cable along the roof edge, treat that as a symptom worth investigating rather than a solution you have already bought.
A dam that repeats in one spot usually means a heat leak that repeats below it: a bath fan venting into the attic, a light fixture, a gap over an interior wall, or a section where the insulation stops short. That pattern is real information, so point it out to whoever inspects. Roof work and heat cable manage the water once it is there; sealing and insulating the ceiling below is what keeps the ice from forming.
Yes, and up to a point it is supposed to, since attics are ventilated deliberately. The problem is when that moving air travels through the insulation instead of over the top of it. On an exposed lot you can end up with loose material blown back from the eaves and a cold band running along every exterior wall. Baffles and blocking at the edges address that. Piling more material in the middle of the attic does not.
It might be, but assume nothing until somebody has looked. Material that old has usually settled and been disturbed, and the practice it was installed under is not the practice used now. What matters is whether the coverage is continuous, whether it is dry, and whether the large air leaks were ever sealed. Those are things you learn by going into the attic, not by knowing what year the house went up.
Cold rooms, drafts, ice at the eaves, or an attic you have never been in. Any of it is a place to start.