Insulation materials are vital for protecting a home, and the insulation you choose will impact your home’s energy performance. Today, insulating a home has been narrowed down to a science, and these days, professionals like ours at Ottawa Insulation focus on insulating and protecting specific areas of your home to improve heat control. If you’re struggling to determine which insulation type you should choose, here’s why we recommend spray foam insulation versus other traditional insulation methods.
What is the Purpose of Insulation?
Insulation has been around for ages and is an important investment for maintaining buildings. Insulation material helps reduce the flow of thermal energy, or the energy responsible for temperature changes. Heat changes occur with three basic mechanics – conduction, convection, and radiation.
- Conduction controls the way heat moves through solid materials.
- Convection controls the way heat moves through liquids and gasses.
- Lastly, radiation is all about how heat travels and what happens to the heat when anything solid absorbs the energy.
These three mechanics are vital aspects of home management, and insulation materials control one or more of these mechanics to help maintain the home’s internal temperature. Insulation manages all of these mechanisms to protect your home from poor energy efficiency, making it an invaluable asset.
What Areas In Your Home Need Insulation
Each type of insulation serves a different purpose, based on the materials they’re made of and their inherent properties. These areas include:
- Attic Spaces: Attics are arguably the most important areas in a home to insulate due to how heat rises. As heat rises, the attic is the final place where heat can escape during the colder months. This also applies during summer, when the heat from summer weather rises out of the home and into the attic, making your living spaces easier to cool.
- Ceilings: The ceilings, like the attic, are vital as they’re they protect your home from poor temperature regulation. As heat rises, the ceilings protect your home from condensation and losing valuable air control when facing extreme heat or cold conditions.
- Exterior and Interior Walls: Both the interior and exterior walls need insulation, as they help keep conditioned air inside the home and prevent outside air from entering. The walls are part of your home’s foundation for maintaining temperature, hence why insulating the walls ensures that your home will have a consistent temperature all around.
- Floors: If the walls and attic are doing their job and you still feel the effects of the weather outside, then the floors need insulation. An uninsulated floor can absorb heat flow, leaving rooms unevenly warm or cold throughout the year.
Understanding The Types of Insulation Available To You
Many professional insulators and contractors use various materials, but here are some of the most common types used in today’s homes.
- Spray Foam Insulation: It is a composite material that forms when two chemicals, usually isocyanate and polyol resin, meet and create a foam solution. The foam solution creates pockets of cells that close air gaps to make it difficult for heat to pass through.
- Fiberglass Insulation: The most common type is made of extremely fine glass fibers. These fibers are made from molten, recycled glass and are often used for spaces with limited cavity spaces, such as attics and crawl spaces.
- Cellulose Insulation: Cellulose insulation is often composed of recycled paper and mineral borate to ensure fire and insect resistance. It can be densely packed in attics, wall spaces, exterior sidings, and other home areas to ensure heat insulation.
- Mineral Wool Insulation: Mineral wool insulation refers to two specific types. Rock wool is a manmade material made from rocks such as diabase and basalt, and slag wool is made from blast furnace slag. Both of these insulation types are fire-resistant.
All of these insulation types have their uses, and depending on the costs and your budget, using any type is better than none. However, if you want to invest in your home and manage your home’s temperature more efficiently, spray foam insulation is considered the best, most valuable type.
Why Spray Foam Insulation is Better For Your Home
While often considered the most expensive insulation for homes, spray foam insulation has many benefits that outweigh those costs. Spray foam insulation is considered today’s best insulation for protecting and regulating your home and is a high-performance insulation material that almost every professional offers and uses when constructing and renovating homes. Here are some reasons why you should choose this type for your home:
- High-Performance: Spray foam insulation is considered a high-performance material because it expands and fills in the tiniest crevices of your attic, floor, basement, and walls to ensure a tight seal. Its R-value per inch is 7, which is considered the highest ranking on the market.
- Energy Efficiency: Because it fills every space, it also helps save on energy bills. It provides better temperature control throughout your home, regardless of the weather or season.
- Airtight Sealing: Spray foam can seal up air leaks and cracks throughout your home and create an airtight seal that’s less porous than other types of insulation, such as fiberglass.
- Moisture Control: It’s also able to fill in cracks and holes and thus can prevent moisture from getting into your home. Spray foam is known to be impervious to water, meaning it will not absorb water when it’s present.
- Deters Mold and Pests: Because it seals in air cracks and prevents moisture from entering, it deters mold and pests such as rodents and cockroaches. It’s made of polymer materials that are also inedible to those creatures.
- Long Life Span: It has the longest lifespan of all available options, meaning it will save you money down the road and protect your home for decades, as long as the spray foam is inside, away from physical damage or outside factors. According to some studies, it can last up to 30 years at most.
Hire A Professional Insulator at Ottawa Insulation Today!
No matter what, everything related to a home’s temperature is about heat control and how heat flows through different spaces. Properly insulating your home with insulation material can better control that heat and, in turn, better control the expenses paid for when managing energy bills each month. At Ottawa Insulation, our team of professionals can provide spray foam insulation with specialized equipment and expertise that lasts a lifetime. If you want to learn more about our services, contact us today for a free quote and get started!