Attic Insulation

How you know it is the attic

• The upstairs never gets warm, or never cools down in summer
• Heating bills climb every year while the thermostat stays put
• Icicles and ice dams along the eaves each February
• You can see daylight, or feel a draft, around the attic hatch
• The insulation up there is flat, gray, and half the thickness it started at

Why the old insulation stopped working

Fiberglass batts slow heat down. They do nothing about air. In an attic that matters more than anywhere else in the house, because warm air rises and every gap around a wire, a pipe, a light fixture or the top plate is a route out.

After thirty or forty Maine winters those batts have compressed, slumped down the rafter bays, and taken on moisture. What is left is a layer that measures thick on paper and performs like a fraction of it.

What we do instead

We spray foam directly onto the roof deck or the attic floor, depending on how the house is built and whether you want the attic inside or outside the heated envelope. The foam expands into every one of those gaps and hardens there. Insulation and air barrier in one pass, adhered to the framing rather than laid on top of it.

For most attics we use open-cell - it expands far enough to fill the awkward geometry at a ridge or a collar tie, and on a dry attic it gets you the same comfort as closed-cell for less money. Where moisture is in play we use closed-cell instead, and we will tell you which yours needs after we look.

It usually fixes the ice dams too

Ice dams are a heat problem, not a gutter problem. Warm air escaping into the attic melts the snow on the roof, the water runs down to the cold eave and refreezes there. Seal the ceiling so the heat stays in the house, the roof stays cold, and the dam has nothing to form from. More on ice dams.