How Much Insulation Do Maryland Homeowners Need?

If you live in Maryland and want to learn more about the insulation R-values you need in the different areas of your home, this video podcast can help. You need to measure insulation through a slightly different lens. Rather than focusing on which insulation is better, achieving the recommended R-value for specific areas of your home's shell is more critical.

There are two essential things to familiarize yourself with regarding R-value.
First, the R-Value in "Lay" Terms. We measure insulation by its R-value. Insulation has one job - to resist heat flow.  The higher the R-value, the better the insulation resists heat transfer.


00:00 Introduction
01:29 Two Things to Remember About R-Values
02:17 Getting an Insulation ROI
04:04 Insulation's Seasonal Responsibilities
05:00 Typical Boundary (Insulation) Locations Around a  Home
07:43 Should You Remove Existing Insulation?

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Home Comfort Tactics. My name is Eric Gans, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about the R values in Maryland and just the different parts of the attic and different places around the house that need insulation and what those R values need to be.  So before I get started, I think it's important for people to get the right focus when it comes to insulation. 

And what I mean by that is a lot of times I'm getting asked the question what insulation is best.  And I think more appropriately what we need to think about is what insulation solution is best to achieve the right R value based on where the insulation is going. So to take that even a step further, there are different types of ways that houses are built.

that create different types of situations that need to be sealed and insulated, sometimes they need to be blocked and sealed. So we need to have actually a few different things in our repertoire of, you know, solutions so that again, we can achieve the correct R value for the different situations that we encounter when we're working in the field. 

Two things to remember about R value, one, the higher the R value, the more resistance to heat,  and two, insulation needs to be accompanied by air sealing.  So to take that a step further, you're not going to get the right R value from your insulation if you don't have anything stopping the flow of air.  So insulation's job is to slow the transfer or, you know, resist heat.

It's not going to stop the flow of air. So again, in order for it to work effectively. You need to have your air barrier, your air sealing in place. 

To get a good return on your insulation, you gotta get it installed right. And getting insulation right in a home can make an old HVAC system work like a gem.  Too many times I have gone to a house after somebody has replaced their HVAC to do an energy audit,  only to find out that the attic insulation hasn't changed in 25 years. 

And I'm here to tell you that had the person known, it's not their fault, that's why I'm doing this podcast.  If they had known the state of their installation was so bad, they might have been able to get another 4 or 5, maybe even 10 years out of their old machine. Because the motivation for replacing their machine initially was for comfort. 

It's not because the machine had broken down, or that their parts weren't available, or that it had blown up or anything. It simply was for better comfort, and they didn't achieve that. Until they air sealed and insulated their home.  Adjustments to insulation can also have a huge effect on comfort.  So, a lot of times I go into people's houses, into attics, and I see insulation in place.

But, you know, it's scattered over the top. time. It's been moved. Things are not correctly done. Things have gotten sort of out of place, out of whack. And, you know, a few adjustments, meaning air sealing and some other things, maybe adding additional insulation, need to go into effect. And that's going to create, like we talked about before, a much more comfortable home. 

Insulation's job in the winter is to slow the transfer of heat from the inside of the house. to the outside, mainly at the attic, because that's where the pressure inside of a home is greatest. Whenever you have pressure, that's going to move air. That's going to create a, you know, a pressure point. So that is why insulation in the attic is so important. 

In the summertime, it's going to slow the transfer of heat by not allowing as much of the heat that builds up inside of the attic bleed into the house. So that's also why attic insulation is really the number one thing that you want to look at. But, you know, focusing on foundation areas such as crawl spaces, basements.

overhangs. Those are also important too.  Alright, so let's talk about the typical boundary locations around a Maryland house. The first and most common is an attic flat. And that's going to be your typical flat ceiling. wherever the area above the ceiling is connected to the attic. So you could have a second floor attic if you have a two story colonial, maybe you have an additional on the back that has a separate attic.

So it's important to think about all of the different areas around the house that have attic spaces and the place that. You find where the above the attic is a flat ceiling. The recommended R value for Maryland is R49. 

Attic slopes. A lot of houses around Maryland have beautiful sloped ceilings. A lot of times it's up in bedrooms. Sometimes it's over great rooms. Sometimes it's just the, over a bathroom. Uh, the point is, is that a sloped ceiling in Maryland, the R value that we want to achieve is R30. We want 

Vertical walls.  Basement walls, crawl space walls. We want to hit R11.  And on knee walls, so those are walls that are typically in the attic spaces. They're created sometimes by skylights. They could be created by those slope ceilings. Possibly a chimney.  Those need to be insulated to R13. And I highly recommend that an air barrier be added as well. 

Crawl space ceilings. If you decide not to encapsulate a crawl space, which I highly recommend, the recommended R value at the ceiling of a crawl space is R25. So that is something you want to check if you do have insulation at the ceiling of your crawl space. crawl space now. Two things. One, you want to see if there's any type of air barrier in place.

And two, typically those bats that you see that are suspended in the ceiling, they're usually equal to no greater than R20. 

Below a cantilever, very similar to a crawl space ceiling. Those, we want to insulate those to R25.  And the rim joists down in the basement, which is the space at the very top of the foundation wall. We don't want to cut the drywall down to get to it, but anywhere that it's accessible, unfinished areas, the recommended R value.

After air sealing is R 19.  Um, the other thing I wanted to mention, and I would love to get some feedback on, is that I've come across a lot of people here recently that are asking me to have the insulation that they currently have in their attic vacuumed out and cleaned out before any new insulation is put in. 

And when I get up into the attic, it sort of surprises me because I've been in, you know, over 2, 000 attics and a lot of these attics, where people are asking me to do this, the insulation is not really in bad shape.  So the reason why I'm bringing this up today is because the title of this podcast is R Value,  or R Value, Insulation R Value in Maryland, or whatever it is, but the point is that we're talking about R Value. 

I think the operative word there is value because when you have old insulation in your attic, even though it's old, it might be a little bit dusty, it might not look that great. It is giving you some value,  meaning it is working for you to some degree. So why not just give it a little love, you know, bring in a few more troops to combat the heat or combat.

the, the cold, why not make it a little bit stronger by air sealing and putting a little bit more on top that way you're not paying to have it removed and then paying for the additional insulation on top of, you know, what you would have needed had you not taken anything away. So it gets a little bit, uh, in the weeds there, but I'm just.

Really interested what other people's thoughts are on this. I see some people in my field that are helping people out. They're doing this for people that are vacuuming addicts, but  I'm not a proponent of it. So I'd love to hear your comments on that. Thank you so much for watching