Signs Your Home Needs More Insulation:

• High Electricity Bills

Homeowners should track their energy expenditures on a month-to-month and year-to-year basis in order to have context for what they should be paying. If you’re new to the home, you can also call your utility companies to learn about the averages for your area and whether you’re within the norms. An insufficiently insulated home will be more expensive to cool and heat, and rising energy costs are often one of the signs that your insulation is degrading and needs to be replaced.

• Inconsistent Home Comfort

If you can’t get your home as comfortable as you’d like, it could be due to ineffective insulation. Poor insulation means that the home is more susceptible to outside conditions, so even at a consistent temperature setting, your home can feel different. A telltale sign of this in summer is high humidity in the home despite the air conditioner running and the living spaces being relatively cool.

• Tangible Evidence

Your home may also be providing you with tangible evidence that the answer to “Does my home need more insulation?”, is a resounding yes. These include drafts that you can feel near windows and exterior doors. Another sign is ceilings, walls, and floors that feel cold to the touch in winter and warm to the touch in summer. Cold spots and warm spots in rooms are also potential indications.

• Icicles, Ice Dams & Frozen Pipes

Icicles are often an indication that your home needs more insulation because heat rising and escaping the home melts the lowest layer of the ice, which then refreezes as it moves away from the heat. This also creates the potential for ice dams, which can cause serious damage to your roof, and poor insulation also makes your plumbing system susceptible to frozen pipes.

Upgrade Your Home’s Insulation

If you own a home at the Jersey Shore, in South Jersey, or in the neighboring areas of Pennsylvania, Emmons can help. Emmons can inspect your home to determine if you need new insulation or more, and we install both fiberglass and cellulose insulation. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation or with any additional questions about “Does my home need more insulation?”.

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The benefits of an energy efficient home include:

• Reduced utility bills
• A more comfortable home with hot and cold spots eliminated
• Reduction of your home’s carbon footprint by using less carbon based energy sources

Doing a little homework will increase your results. Conduct an energy audit, or enlist the help of a professional energy auditor. Here are a few things to look for:

• If you can see floor joists in the attic, you need to add more insulation.
• If you can see daylight around a door or window, there’s an air leak.
• Run a damp hand along the edges of windows and doors. If there is a draft, it will feel cool to your hand.
• Look for dirty paint at the edges of your outlets on exterior walls – they may need sealing.
• Look for dirty carpet along the baseboards of your exterior walls – you may need to seal the drywall to your sub-floor.

Insulation is the most important addition to a home for improving comfort and savings. Homeowners have options in the type of insulation that would be best in solving the problem: fiberglass batt insulation, blown-in insulation or spray foam insulation. The key areas to focus on are:

• Unfinished basements which can contribute to one-third of a home’s heat loss.
• The attic: If the home is more than 30 years old, it is likely it is substantially below current code recommendations for energy-efficiency.
• Add insulation to exterior walls. Consult a contractor to drill small holes in the stud cavity and add blown-in insulation.
• Use insulation backed siding when re-siding your home.

Emmons Roofing & Siding can handle all of your insulation needs. Contact us today for a free estimate!

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