House Insulation and Building Your Home - 5/1/2003 - House Energy Efficiency Insulation
House Insulation and Building Your Home
A very important consideration when building your own home is house insulation. Insulation comes in many forms including cellulose, fiberglass and foam. The most commonly used insulating materials now are bat fiberglass in the wall and blown fiberglass in the attic or crawl spaces.
Fiberglass House Insulation
We chose fiberglass insulation for several reasons:
It does not retain water if it should get wet in the wall. (it is essentially glass fiber and does not absorb like cellulose).
It maintains it original shape over time and does not settle if installed properly.
Maintains it’s R value over time.
It is non combustible.
We hired a professional insulation contractor to insulate our home. The service included:
Using expandable foam to seal all cracks and air spaces in the framing and openings. This included door frames windows and any space that would allow air exchange with the outside. They used liquid expanding foam and went over the entire home top to bottom. This foam is very similar to what you can buy in a small can at the Home Depot. Of course it would have taken dozens of cans to do our entire home.
Installing R13 insulation in all the walls and R11 in the interior walls for noise dampening.
Installing R30 in the flat ceilings that could not be reached properly with blown insulation.
Installing blown fiberglass insulation in all of the attics.
A few tips on insulation:
Review the recommendations for thickness and R factors at Owens Corning Insulation prior to choosing the insulation that goes in your walls and flat ceilings (unexposed ceilings). Insulations with a higher R factor may not offer better efficiency. If you put a R 30 rated bat insulation in a 2x4 wall you will lose R value because you have to compress the R 30 to make it fit. The R 30 is designed for a 6.5 inch opening. The trapped air in the insulation is the key factor in it’s efficiency. When you squeeze the air out to make it fit you reduce the efficiency drastically.
Insulate your interior walls and upstairs floors to make you house quite. Make sure you insulate the floors of the upstairs rooms that have hard floors.
House insulation Steps
After framing is up and the house was blacked in (sheathing up on outside, roof up) Electrical Rough in done (wires in the framing), Alarm rough in done and Plumbing rough in done (pipes in the framing) the insulators came in and foamed all the cracks and crevasses then installed bat insulation in the interior and exterior walls.
After sheetrock was completed and the HVAC contractor had finished in the attics the insulators came back and blew the loose insulation in the attics. If you install decking in any of your attics wait until after the insulators have finished for installation. They can’t blow the insulation in effectively working around decking.
We hired a professional 
A few tips on insulation: 