Take it from your Greenville, SC Insulation Contractor. Insulation is the #1 savings vehicle for your home. Dollar for dollar, insulation gives you more return on your investment than anything else you do. Most insulation upgrades will pay for themselves in 5-6 years. Past that point, your savings with the utility company stops paying for your upgrade and starts paying you. So, insulation gives you a great return on your investment.
60-70% of your energy costs go right out of your attic because of something called the stack effect. The stack effect is just another way to talk about convection. Convection is heat rising. The heat in your home rises up to the ceiling and goes out all the cracks – the electrical cracks around the baseboard, the cracks above the doors, the cracks in your closets. Then, it goes right out of the attic.
When we do an attic upgrade, we use cellulose insulation, which is just ground-up newspaper. It stops about 90% of the air from escaping from your attic. So, just blowing stabilized spray cellulose into your attic stops a lot of the air exfiltration. Then, on the harder cases – mainly older homes – we spray the tops of the walls with fog to seal them. We spray around electrical boxes. Especially on plaster homes because they are so leaky. What we are trying to do is seal the floor of your attic so that air is no longer escaping from your house.