Stay Warm With Attic Insulation

A well-insulated attic is like a cozy sweater on a windy day. It keeps your warm air in and stops cold air from entering. To keep the warmth in, you need both insulation and air sealing.

Without proper metal building insulation, heat escapes through the attic and into living spaces during the summer, forcing your cooling system to work harder. Adding attic insulation reduces energy consumption and lowers cooling costs.

High cooling bills are a sign that your attic isn’t properly insulated. Stand on a ladder and feel the ceiling — if it’s hot, your attic needs more insulation.

Upstairs rooms often feel warmer than downstairs rooms, which could be because of the stack effect or lack of attic insulation. When you add attic insulation and air seal your home, the temperature stays consistent throughout each floor of your home.

Optimize Your Attic Space with Proper Insulation

Attic insulation can also help prevent frozen pipes. Without enough insulation, warm air can seep through attic space and cause your pipes to freeze in the winter. A properly insulated attic prevents this from happening and makes it easier for your heating system to keep your house warm.

Attic insulation can also reduce noise, particularly from outside and inside your home. Open cell spray foam insulation offers the best noise reduction, but cellulose and fiberglass are also great options. With a high R-value, they’re affordable and can be blown into old or new attics. R-value is a measurement of an insulation’s efficiency, and the R-value you need depends on your climate zone and the size of your attic space.

Coastline Insulation of Pensacola
2007 N 11th Ave Pensacola FL 32503
(850)-565-1027

A radiant barrier (sometimes called bubble wrap insulation) reflects the sun’s heat, keeping attics cooler and saving energy. This type of insulation is most useful in hot climates where high cooling costs can occur, but it can also help to reduce heating bills in colder climates as well.

When the sun hits your roof, it heats the shingles and radiates that heat into the attic space. Bryars Spray Foam keeps this heat from infiltrating living spaces during the summer and can cut cooling costs by 5% to 10%.

These barriers are made of foils with low emissivity surfaces. They are the same materials used on the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module that was launched to the moon and limited the amount of radiation that was transmitted back into space.

Radiant Barrier Benefits Explained: How They Improve Energy Efficiency

While radiant barriers reflect the solar radiation that enters an attic, they don’t stop conductive and convective heat transfer like thermal insulation. That’s why it’s important to pair them with an attic ventilation system and a layer of traditional insulation.

If you use spray foam insulation, make sure that one (reflective) side is facing an air space, such as a ventilated attic. Otherwise, the heat from the attic space will pass right through the insulation and be absorbed by the air around it.

A radiant barrier has a lower R-value than blown in insulation, but it doesn’t need to be treated with chemicals and has very little maintenance requirements. It is a great option for homeowners that want to save energy without spending a lot of money. However, it is important to have radiant barrier installed by a professional in order to ensure proper installation and compliance with local building and fire codes.

Bryars Spray Foam
Elrod, Alabama (Service area type of client)
(205) 576-5009