When you buy a home, especially an older home, you sometimes get unpleasant surprises. One of these tends to be the fact that your home has no insulation, or not enough insulation. It is important to correct this situation if you don’t want to end up wasting a lot of money heating and cooling your home. Although there are many types of insulation available, one of the more affordable and easy to install options is usually blow in insulation. And unlike batts, this type of insulation can be used in hard to reach and hard to fit locations.
If there is no insulation in your walls, a small hole can be made in the wall and the blow in insulation can be used to fill the space in the walls and insulate them. It can also be used to insulate an unfinished attic. Sometimes there is already blow in insulation in your attic, but there might not be enough or it may have been compressed. In these cases you can simply add more insulation on top of the old insulation.
It is easiest to hire an experience professional when you have large areas that need to be insulated, however, it is possible to install blow in insulation yourself. There are numerous websites with instructions on how to go about doing this. You can purchase the insulation at home improvement stores, and you can rent the blowing equipment there as well usually.
There are a few different types of blow in insulation. Fiberglass blow in insulation is said to have the highest R value, meaning you will need a thinner layer of insulation in order to effectively insulate your house. One example of this type of insulation is Johns Manville’s Attic Protector Loose Fill Fiber Glass Insulation. Some people say that to make this type of insulation even more effective you can top off fiberglass blow in insulation with cellulose insulation.
Cellulose insulation has a lower R value, but is also popular. It is made from newspaper that has been treated to be more fire resistant and repellent to insects and critters, and can be blown into a space using either a wet or a dry method, depending on the situation. If you live in the Southwest you can purchase this type of blow in insulation from McCoy’s Building Supply for $10.65 for a bag that covers about 25 square feet.
