The Benefits of Attic Insulation

There are many benefits to be gained from installing attic insulation in your home, but the major two are the cost savings and the increased heat retention, or coolness in hot weather that it provides. The ecological benefits are also fairly obvious along with the peripheral benefit of adding value to your home. Let's take a look at each of the major benefits in turn and see how they affect you and your home in many different ways.

The Cost Benefit of Attic Insulation

The major deciding factor for people having attic insulation installed in their homes is the long term saving on their energy bills. Standards of minimum insulation values (R values) differ from country to country, but it is always a smart move to insulate to a greater value than the bare minimum if you want to reap the greatest benefits in energy savings over time. The cost savings over time will more than pay for the installation costs within ten years and often sooner depending upon your home's energy consumption for heating and cooling. Remember that energy costs increase over time too, so the initial savings calculated at today's prices will be even more pronounced at energy prices in say five years time.

Energy Saving Benefits

In cool climates, the greatest amount of heat loss in a home is through the roof, so installing efficient attic systems with radiant insulation should be the first place you do it and where you can make major savings. The same goes for those hot summer months when a generous insulation barrier in your attic will help to keep the house several degrees cooler than an un-insulated home.

By retaining heat in cool weather and preventing overheating in hot weather, this type of insulation will greatly reduce the amount of energy, be it electricity, gas (butane/propane or natural gas), wood or oil that is used to produce the heat (or in the case of air conditioning, electricity to create cool air). This leads not just to lower energy bills but means you are using less of the resources that are produced or imported by your country for that purpose, which leads us onto the reduction in your ecological impact.

Ecological Saving

When you use less energy to heat or cool your home, you are doing your part in the grand scheme of the environmental balance of your country and the planet on which you live. We haven't yet got to the stage where we can draw all our energy needs from totally renewable sources. In fact, today, less than one percent of all the energy used in the United States comes from renewable sources. In Europe, that figure is much higher, with between 10 and 20 percent of their energy produced from renewable sources. This figure is even higher in some countries where almost 100 percent of electricity production comes from hydro-power plants. Even so, most of the world's electricity is produced using fossil fuel (coal, oil, natural gas) which is not renewable and as the world's supply dwindles, the price will go ever upwards.

Adding Value to Your Home

This is another aspect of having the best insulation you can afford to install. It actually adds value to your home. Should you decide that it has come time to sell, you will get a better price as well as better response from buyers who will prefer to buy a house that is already fully insulated rather than have to go through the process of doing it themselves.

Types of Loft Insulation

There are several types of radiant heat barrier attic insulation. These include laying fibreglass insulating material on the attic floor, fitting a radiant foil barrier beneath the roof tiles, using radiant barrier paints or insulating paint to insulate or a combination of types to maximise the R value of your loft. More information can be found on radiant barrier insulation here.

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