A home should be a place you want to spend time in. Part of wanting to spend time somewhere is making it a comfortable space. People decorate to their tastes, include carpeting and plush blankets and pillows, set up entertainment systems and stock up on foods they like. What you might not think of as an integral part of home comfort is insulation. Insulation is a set of materials meant to maintain the temperature of your home throughout the year by reducing heat flow. Here’s what you need to know about the importance of insulation.
Maintaining a Comfortable Living Space
The main benefit of insulation is comfort. It can help keep your home from being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, which also helps keep your home’s heating or cooling system from being overworked. Without insulation, the heat in your home will flow to colder areas like the basement and garage. It can even leak out from door and window frames. The same thing happens in the summer with a home’s air conditioning. But if you install good insulation, you can avoid this heat transference that causes this leeching effect.
Insulation even helps in ways you might not have thought about. If your home has an attic space you use for storage, you’ll want to insulate there even if you’re not spending a lot of time up there yourself. The heat of summer can melt plastic and cold weather can make certain materials more brittle, so insulation can help protect things in storage. Garage door insulation is also something people don’t really think about. Even though people arguably spend more time in their garages than their attics, they tend to overlook this area.
Saving Money and Energy
Aside from the comfort factor of good insulation, it’s also an important aspect of saving money and energy. If your home doesn’t have adequate insulation, you’re going to be running your heating and cooling systems more often. Because of that, you’ll be looking at higher heating and electric bills. You might even be looking at higher costs to operate your heating and cooling systems too if you overwork them. Not only that, but you’ll be wasting the energy these systems use to maintain your home’s temperature. Good insulation can help you conserve energy and avoid inflated costs.
Understand the R-Value
The R in R-value stands for resistance to heat flow. A higher R-value means the insulation is better at controlling and reducing heat flow. There are many different R-values, and the kind you need depends on a few things, like whether you use central air or a furnace to heat your home, how big your home is, what your home is made of and where you live. For example, you’ll need insulation with a higher R-value if you live in Maine than if you live in Arizona. You might even need to use insulation with different R-values if you’re installing it in an attic or garage. There’s more heat transfer in those areas, so a higher R-value may be necessary.
How you choose to fill and decorate your space is how you make it your own. But without insulation, you may not feel physically comfortable enough in your home to enjoy it.