With energy costs soaring, every effort should be made to conserve the heat or cooling that you pay for. Energy efficiency is high on the list for saving money. Is your home energy efficient? Have you recently upgraded things like weather stripping, dual pane windows, attic insulation etc. How do you know if you actually got what you paid for?
I live in a rental house in Southern California. Recently, we have been experiencing a triple digit heat wave. This house was remodeled recently, including full attic insulation. Or so I thought. I have looked and there is insulation up there. As it turns out, it was poorly installed but I did not know this until I did a Thermal Scan of the walls and ceilings on a 100 degree day. I was shocked! They missed so many places it was ridiculous! I was loosing money trying to cool the house while the attic was pumping heat right back into the living space. Here are some of the thermal scans I took.
Ceiling can light Can Light
These are scans of the can lights in the ceiling of my living room.(the lights were NOT on at the time) Notice the temperature of the target spot. The surrounding darker areas are where there is some insulation. The dark areas are 15-20 degrees cooler. Insulation really does work!
Missing insulation More missing insulation
Here we see the effects of missing batt type ceiling insulation. Here the temperature difference is about 10 degrees.
Uninsulated Attic Hatch
This is the uninsulated attic access hatch. Notice the bar graph on the right side of the picture showing the temperature by color. Parts of this single layer drywall hatch cover were were about 106 degrees! Given that heat moves to cold, this was like running an electric heater in the ceiling while I was trying to cool the house with the A/C! No wonder my electric bill is so high!
Have you just had new insulation installed? Do you need more insulation? A Thermal Scan will tell you right away. Many insulation installers are sloppy and do a poor job. Hold their feet to the fire with the proof of a Thermal Scan to show where they did a crappy job and force them to do it right. Get what you paid for!
IMHO, blown in type insulation gives better coverage than often poorly installed batt type. Blown in has its issues too. Attics need ventilation. This is usually accomplished with peak or gable end vents and soffet or eve vents to provide flow through. The blown-in insulation can be improperly placed so as to block the soffet vents thus stopping the air flow. Sheet metal barriers are typically used to hold the insulation back from the vents to allow the proper air flow. TIP: install a thermostatically controlled power attic fan. These can drop the attic temperature by 20+ degrees on a hot day.
Another problem area for both batt and blown-in is can lights. Not all can lights are designed to be covered with insulation. Covering these can be a fire hazard and I often call this out during my home inspections. The sheet metal barriers are use here too to hold the insulation back 12 inches. This leads to the result you see in the first pictures above. The can lights leak heat into the conditioned space. The only fix for this is to replace the cans with a style that can be insulated.
Contact a local Thermographer and have a Thermal Scan of your interior walls and ceilings. Add insulation and then have the Thermographer scan again to verify that the job was actually done properly.
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