How to Tell If Your Home Is Properly Insulated

Ensuring that your home is properly insulated is crucial to efficient home energy. Good insulation can save you a significant amount of money on your energy bills while also boosting the comfort of your home.

Key Indicators of Poor Insulation

If you want to evaluate how your home insulation is performing, there are a few key indicators you can assess. Watch for these signs to see where you might need to improve your home’s insulation:

• Drafts of cold air: Are there areas of your home where you can feel cold air seeping in? The spaces around your doors, windows, and rim joists probably don’t have proper insulation to keep in energy.
• High monthly utility bills: If your home energy bills are consistently coming in higher than you expect and you can’t figure out where the money is going, you may have an insulation issue that’s letting energy escape from your home.
• Fluctuating temperature: Do you have trouble maintaining a consistent temperature in certain rooms or areas of your house? Your home is probably poorly insulated in those areas, making it hard to regulate the thermostat.
• Cold rooms or floors: When your house lacks proper insulation in specific floors, crawl spaces, attics, or rim joists, those areas might seem to always be cold because they don’t have the insulation to hold in energy.

How to Maintain Proper Insulation

If you’re experiencing any telltale signs of poor insulation in your house, there are a few measures you can take to improve your home’s energy efficiency. To get started, examine the two areas most often responsible for insulation issues.

Add or Replace Insulation in Key Spaces

If you’ve identified that specific rooms or spots in your home are especially cold, take a look in the attic, crawl space, or walls closest to the area. Check for areas that are missing insulation completely, have damp or sagging fiberglass, or have hole-ridden insulation from pests’ nibbling.

Spaces with no insulation or inadequate insulation can have a sizable impact on your home’s overall energy efficiency, so it’s essential to add new insulation to these areas to keep heated or cooled air in the house where it belongs.

Get Energy-Efficient Windows and Doors

Often, cold drafts get in through windows and doors that lack sufficient insulation and sealing in your home. To determine if these home fixtures might be causing energy inefficiencies, find the source of drafts in rooms that seem to stay cold. Check if there’s any air coming in underneath or around the door, or if you can feel a draft around the window sashes or panes.

If you identify insulation issues with your doors or windows, ensure that they’re properly sealed and consider investing in fixtures with optimal insulation. Installing thicker-paned windows and well-insulated doors will save you money on energy costs in the long term.

Improve Your Home Energy Efficiency With Shipley Energy

At Shipley Energy, we want to help you ensure that you can use your home energy as efficiently as possible. For information about how we can improve your home’s energy efficiency, get in touch with us about your service needs today.