When it comes to keeping your family comfortable in your home, most homeowners here in the greater Chicagoland and Frankfort area think about the things we can see—like keeping the doors and windows closed, adjusting the thermostat, and using blankets and cozy socks in the rooms that just don’t seem to stay warm during Midwest winters.
But what about some of the things we can’t see that can make our homes more comfortable? Proper insulation is essential to keeping your indoor temperatures as stable as possible throughout the seasons (yes, all of them!), but one of the most important places you may not think about when it comes to insulation is the basement or crawl space. Here’s why.
How Basement Insulation Helps Your Whole Home
Your living space is sandwiched between your attic and the area underneath your home—the basement or crawl space. In the summer, the heat from the sun will beat down on your roof, heating up the attic air which will then try and force its way into your home where there are cooler temperatures. Proper attic insulation can keep attic temperatures cooler, keeping your home more comfortable in the process.
Now, what if we flipped that process on its head? In the winter time, as you heat up your home using your furnace, boiler, or heat pump, that heat will search for cooler temperatures by rising up out of your home through tiny holes, cracks, gaps, and lapses in your wall and attic insulation. That air needs to be replaced somehow, and an uninsulated or leaky basement is happy to fill that role. This is often referred to as “the stack effect”. Symptoms of a home that does not have good basement ceiling insulation or wall insulation can include:
Cold floors on winter mornings
Unstable indoor temperatures
Unexpectedly high heating costs
Indoor drafts
The Most Effective Way To Insulate a Basement
Not all basements or crawl spaces have been created equally, thus not every home will have the same basement insulation needs. At Assured Insulation, finding the best insulation for basement walls or basement floor insulation will greatly depend on how your basement functions in relation to the design of your home.
We may recommend spray foam insulation on your basement or crawl space walls if the space is unventilated, or we may find that spray foam is only needed on the basement floor. Either way, we are an insulation contractor that takes the time to thoroughly diagnose your home’s insulation needs first, before we begin any insulation work in your home!
Assured Insulation Is Here to Help!
With a properly insulated basement or crawl space, you can experience a number of benefits all year long that you may not have even known you were missing out on, like lower heating and cooling costs throughout the year, fewer indoor drafts, and in some cases, greater soundproofing from the outside noise!
If you have been tossing around insulation questions like, “Do I need to insulate my basement walls below grade?” or, “What kind of basement wall insulation panels should I buy?”, we are here to help.