Do It Yourself: Energy Savings at Home
Attics

Watch the video:

Kathy Hopkins, University of Maine Cooperative Extension Educator: After you’ve sealed all the leaks in your house -- all the joints and penetrations where air is seeping in to your house -- take a walk up to your attic and see what’s going on up in your attic.

Many attics have insufficient insulation and if you look around in your attic, take a measuring instrument with you as well and see how much you actually do have. In this attic that we’re in we have some older insulation; it looks a little compressed here but it looks like it was about six inches and that’s really not enough any more. These days, you could put more in here.

When you think about adding insulation in to your attic, you want to check around first and make sure that there are no safety issues that you need to think about. One of those safety issues would be old wiring. Old knob and tube wiring is not really safe to be packing anything around it can be a real challenge. If you have something like that, you need to call an electrician and have them come and look at it and tell you what needs to be done.

Also, if you have major leaks -- if you have chimneys with any issues -- that should all be fixed before you put in any more insulation. If there are cracks in the chimney or cracks around the chimney, all that should be dealt with by a contractor.

If you look in your attic and you see any signs of moisture, leaking on the roof or on the attic boards or on the rafters themselves, you need to call a contractor because something needs to be done about that before you add more insulation. It’s always easier to do that before you put more in, that the contractor would have to work around, and the risk of putting it in before you have a contractor look at these issues is that you might just ruin the insulation. Insulation that gets wet is not a very good insulator and you would have to start all over again. So, these are some things to think about.

Also, if you have recessed lighting in your home, that’s something that you need to be very careful if you’re adding insulation around that. Most of the can lighting -- they’re also called “can lights” -- are into your ceiling here and you can’t put insulation right up around those lights -- it becomes a fire hazard.

Also around your chimney, you need to insulate up to the chimney, but not right around it. Anything that comes in contact with a heat-producing unit -- motors, lights, chimneys -- should not be insulated right up against, because it is a tremendous fire hazard.

Another thing you want to check is the actual access door that you have; make sure that it is insulated as well with some foam and maybe some fiberglass on top of that. That will really help in keeping the heat down in the living area, but also if you have a piece of plywood for your access door, check the framing around where the attic door actually sits, measure it, and then get some foam weather striping and put that right in to seal that space off so when you put that access door back in, you won’t have any leaking. With the weather striping in place you can replace your access door and it will sit nice and tight and sealed, and it will keep the air from moving out of your heated space into the attic.