Attic Insulation

The proper attic insulation is crucial to maintaining a comfortable temperature in your home. As a result of properly installed insulation, your home stays warm in winter while it remains cool in summer, allowing air to circulate and keep you from overheating. Buying Owens Corning attic insulation can save homeowners money and increase their comfort, among other benefits. For a roof to perform appropriately, more than shingles are needed. Roofs work as systems. A properly insulated attic and a properly ventilated roof work together to maintain a comfortable and energy-efficient home. A correctly insulated attic can decrease your electric bill by 20%.

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Attic Insulation: Perfect Time to Re-Insulate

The best time to add insulation to a home is during a re-roofing project when a Top of The House professional can inspect the attic. Re-roofing can be performed by removing a sheet of decking from the deck, introducing the hose of the Owens Corning attic insulation machine, and ensuring that no mess is left inside the home.

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Attic Insulation: How Does Insulation Work? 

It is true that heat always moves towards cold, which is why heat tries to escape from a home in winter and tries to enter a home in summer. Air is trapped within tiny pockets of fiberglass insulation, preventing heat from moving into or out of the house. Additional benefits include controlling humidity and air infiltration, ensuring proper ventilation, and improving the efficiency of the heating and cooling systems.

Attic Insulation: What is R-Value?

R-Value is a measure of the capability of insulation to resist the flow of heat. The higher the R-Value, the better the insulation’s resistance to heat flow. There is no direct relationship between the R-value of insulation and its thickness, but it is related to the total number of fibers per square inch or its density. R-value will be higher if the insulation is thicker or denser since it has more air pockets. How much attic insulation is required in Tennessee? In order to achieve an R-60 rating, the Tennessee region should be insulated to R-49-R60. For an R-60 rating, blown-in insulation from 19-20 inches will be needed in a home’s attic.

Attic Insulation: Common Insulation Questions

Attic insulation can be determined by looking at the rafters in the attic. If you see them, odds are the home needs more insulation in the attic. Experts can determine the proper amount of insulation for your home based on the particular case, however. There is a recommendation for different amounts of attic insulation for homes located in different geographic locations throughout the United States. The DOE recommends R-60 for the southern region. Insulation for the attic is a year-round product, so whether it’s warm or cold outside, it slows the flow of heat from one area to another. By insulating a house properly, you will be able to live in a comfortable and reliable home, and you will be able to decrease your monthly heating and cooling bills as well.

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 Attic Ventilation: More is Better

There are two kinds of roof vents needed for an attic’s proper ventilation: intake vents installed at the eaves, which let outside air into the attic, and exhaust vents located at the ridge, which exhaust hot air out. It is highly recommended to have a 50/50 intake/exhaust ratio for attic ventilation, but a 60/40 balance would be optimal, with 60% of the intake occurring at the roof eaves. In the absence of both of these ratios, there is no attic ventilation at all. Most people think that adding more roof ventilation is better. But in this specific case, more is not better, and you can make some serious mistakes when it comes to attic ventilation.

There is a 1/300 rule recommended by the DOE, Department of Energy, and it is very simple. It states that for every 300 square feet of attic flooring, you need one square foot of net-free ventilation. There are many building codes that have requirements for 1/150. This is perfectly acceptable if you can adjust it. Adding ridge vents to modern roofs is difficult due to the tiny ridge to add ridge vents, making venting an attic a challenge. Due to today’s current home’s 10/12-16/12 pitches with numerous facets, proper roof ventilation is even more challenging.

Attic Ventilation: Common Mistakes

There is a standard error in adding more than one type of exhaust vent to the roof. Many people add turbines (whirlybirds) along with ridge vents. This leads to a roof ventilation short circuit, which they are unaware of. As an example, if someone chooses to add vents halfway up the slope to a complete soffit and ridge ventilation system. He has now damaged the roof’s ability to expel hot air rather than improving ventilation.

You will exhaust your hot air halfway up the slope and leave part of your attic improperly vented. Additionally, depending on wind pressure, air would be taken in by the vents halfway up the slope, reducing the amount of air pumped into the house at the eaves.

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Why Is Proper Attic Insulation Important?

It’s not enough to put shingles on the roof to keep the home protected from the elements. Attic insulation and ventilation play an essential role in maintaining a comfortable indoor temperature, as well.

Insulating the attic with a high-quality system, such as Owens Corning Top of the House, is beneficial for homeowners in the following ways:

• • Improved energy efficiency. By insulating an attic properly, you can lower your energy expense by decreasing the amount of energy consumed to heat a home.

• • Lower carbon footprint. Greenhouse gas emissions are mainly from energy used in homes and buildings. The attic provides an easy and cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions and help the environment by stopping the loss of energy through the surface of the home that leaks the most heat: the roof.

• Greater roof longevity. A properly insulated attic will reduce the likelihood of moisture and ice dams forming on the roof, thereby extending the lifespan of shingles.

Why Is Attic Ventilation Important?

Insulation keeps heat in, but it is important to also install a ventilating system to promote airflow. When a roof space is not ventilated adequately, moisture can build up in the attic, which can lead to a variety of problems.

• • Sagging roof deck. When decks aren’t properly ventilated, sagging can occur within a few years and make them unsafe to walk on. In this case, it looks like sumps in the decking, which are called deck deflections. Decking between the rafters literally sags because of the added humidity.

• • Dry rot. Condensation causes dry rot in plywood decking as a result of the failure to escape moisture from the attic.

• • A metal object, such as nail heads, within the attic, condenses water. Rust grows on the nail heads, which causes them to fall off. Rusting can cause metal straps that hold HVAC ducting and plumbing to break, causing them to crash through or come into contact with the ceiling joists. Humid climates are more likely to experience this.

• • Insect infestation.

• • Mold, mildew, fungi, and spores. These can cause health problems and damage the house structure.

• • Reduced R-value of insulation. This indicates that insulation fails to maintain the home’s internal temperature as effectively as it should. When a home is not adequately insulated, moisture will accumulate in the attic, causing the insulation to be less effective.

• Ice dams. A roof leak can result from snow melting and freezing repeatedly near the perimeter. In order to eliminate ice dams, cold roof assemblies combine heavy insulation with proper ventilation.

Proper attic ventilation plays a significant role as there are multiple appliances present in the home that can contribute to producing moisture in the attic space. Washing machines, dishwashers, bathtubs, showers, and tumble dryers are some of the things that are included and produce water vapors. In short, these things should be properly ventilated to avoid condensation in the attic. In worst-case scenarios, the condensation gets so worse that it is often mistaken as a roof leak.

What Is Proper Attic Insulation?

Owen Corning tries its best to provide the best quality insulation that can tackle all the problems mentioned above. Our Top of the House system can help in keeping heat inside your home without moisture buildup inside the attic.

Proper attic insulation must be sustainable and protect homeowners and their families health. It is our goal to help you make a healthier home by offering better indoor air quality with our PINK FIBERGLASTM insulation products, which are GREENGUARD and GREENGUARD Children & Schools Certified.

Over half a ton of greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by the Owens Corning blown-in FIBERGLAS insulation every year. Sealing air leaks could reduce heat loss even further, making a further and noticeable decrease in heating and cooling bills. The energy-saving and clean air properties of FIBERGLAS make it the best choice for residential properties, according to OWEN Corning.

The combinations of our attic vent and insulation products are recommended to ensure adequate ventilation of the attic space. Many kinds of attic ventilation are available in the market, including static vents, power vents, ridge vents, turbine vents, soffit/cornice vents, gable vents, starter vents, and cupola vents. A variety of shapes and colors are available in these vent options. You must choose the right attic for your roof according to the roof configuration, attic size, and local climate.

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Learn More About Proper Attic Insulation

Owen Corning has been working for years on insulating and venting attics to protect the house structure and residents from harm. You can reduce the amount of energy that is utilized in keeping your house cold or warm in different weathers using the Owen Corning products. Find out more about Owen Corning by contacting our staff. Attic stairway insulators are a few of the accessories that help to enhance the productivity of attic insulation systems better.

In the Owens Corning attic stairway insulator, PureFiber technology is combined with tough, highly reflective foil to provide durable insulation. When installed properly, this lightweight product adds R-10 to the home. Only one size of attic stairway insulator is available; however, this size is more than enough to fit most standard stairway openings. In addition to the Owens Corning baffles and recessed can lighting covers, there are other great Owens Corning products for attic insulation projects.

To cover an outlet that is not IC-rated, try to keep the insulation 3 inches away from the light fixture. Owens Corning recessed light cover is the ideal product for this task. If you are not careful when adding Owens Corning expandable attic insulation near the eaves, it may cover the soffit vents. Owens Corning baffles will keep air flowing upward.