A home is where we go to relax, to be with family; a haven from theoutside world. It should be a comfortable place where you can be at ease. But if your home is feeling drafty or more often colder than it should be, it won’t be comfortable, it will be a concern.
There are three main reasons why your home might feel cold despite being insulated: the vapor barrier is not effective (or absent in some cases), the insulation is not thick enough, or there’s HVAC issues.
Insulation is only as good as how air tight it is, and a vapor barrier is essential to prevent air from moving where you don’t want it to.
A quick pop into an attic will prove there’s insulation, but it is more than just the material used to insulate. It’s a whole assembly, and the vapor barrier plays an extremely important part. Some older homes don’t have a vapor barrier as it wasn’t always required by the building code to install one.
In a cold climate like ours in Calgary, you can’t skimp on the vapor barrier because that's what is physically going to stop air movement. It’s what separates the warm humid air being pushed through the house through the furnace and the cold exterior air. Without a very well air-sealed vapor barrier, you're going to lose air to the other side of the insulation.
At Beyond, we recommend 6mil polyethylene (this is not a millimeter measurement, but means the poly is 6 millionths of an inch thick) that is sealed with an acoustical sealant and blue tuck tape.
Both the vapor barrier and insulation work together to create a comfortable and energy efficient home.
So, there’s an airtight vapor barrier and a bunch of insulation in your attic, but the house is still cold. It could be that there’s just not enough of the insulating material to keep the heat in.
An R-value is the measure of thermal resistance of an insulating material which tells how well the heat is kept in or out of a building – the higher the number, the better the insulation is working.
The R-value of an insulating material works on a per inch of product. Different types of insulation have different R-Values. For example, the most common type of insulation, fiberglass, is rated at 3.2 per inch, so a few inches of it won’t be enough in a ceiling to keep a house warm.
An R50 or 60 rating from insulation in a ceiling is a nice number to keep your home comfortable, but most homes are found to be around R20 or 30,again, not enough to warm up your home.
Checking the depth of the fiberglass insulation in a ceiling is a good way to determine if you might need more. Typically, less than 14 inches is a sign you’re due for a top up.
Cellulose insulation is quite dense, so it settles and gets compacted over time, therefore it will need to be topped up to ensure it’s doing a proper job.
Insulation is only as good as the heat or cold that you're putting into it. A detached garage, for example, can be fully insulated but without a heater, it will just trap the cold air inside.
A problem with your HVAC system could be another reason your home feels cold.
The furnace might not be putting out enough warm air or that warm air isn’t making it to its destination. In other words, the warm air is losing heat somewhere between the furnace and the duct in the floor.
Cold air returns (that vent along a lower wall) are often overlooked as a source of a cold home issue. This vent is what puts air back into the furnace. However, if the return vent is also drawing air out of a room, it will create a negative pressure effect.
Picture a box with one hole in it. If you pump air into the box, the air has nowhere to go, so it’s not effectively circulating the air. But if you poke another hole on the other side of the box and have that air returning, you now have constant air movement through that box that is going to maintain the temperature appropriately.
"Insulation is only as good as the heat or cold that you're putting into it"
Having a lot of windows on your home can create a colder home environment because windows don’t carry much R-value.
Newer argon gas windows are airtight but might only have a value of R6. So, many windows equal less heat retention.
The Stack effect only applies to buildings that are two stories or taller. With a poorly sealed attic the heat will rise and escape out of the attic, making the house a negative pressure environment.
This forces the house to draw air in through other poorly sealed areas in the lower part of the house, such as windows, doors, walls, cantilevers in turn causing bad drafts throughout the home.
If your home is giving you the chills, it’s likely one of these three issues causing it. Whether a vapor barrier issue, insulation not up to snuff, HVAC problems, or perhaps the stack effect is occurring, or older windows need to be replaced. The first step is to give us a call, and we can help navigate where the cold air is hanging out and how to rectify it to make your home a warm (in all senses of the word) place to be again.
