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Where to Add Insulation in a Home?
In a cold winter, you want to keep your hard-earned heating dollars inside your home, which means cutting down heat loss with insulation. Heat is lost from a house in every direction, not just ‘up,’ and it’s lost in three ways – conduction, convection, and radiation.
Conduction is transfer through material contacts, like the way heat will conduct to your hand if you pick up the hot handle of an iron frying pan on the stove. Convection is the movement of air, like the way hot air rises above a heater. Radiation is the energy that transmits in all directions through space from hot to cold objects. It’s like the heat you feel if you hold your hand a few inches away from that hot frying pan.
Insulation mainly slows down conduction, but some types of insulation will also create air barriers to prevent convection and air leakage.
Based on these three principles, it makes sense to insulate all the surfaces that reach the exterior, including basement walls, ground slab, above-grade walls, and ceilings. But although heat goes in all directions, we know that hot air actually does rise, which means you do get more heat loss from the top than the bottom of a house. This is why the ceiling needs the thickest insulation and is a good place to start if you can only do one part at a time.
There are lots of other insulation types out there, like sheep’s wool insulation, denim batt insulation (made from recycled jeans!) and straw bales. We can’t cover them all in this article, but they all have their applications, as well as pros and cons.
Which insulation to choose for which purpose?
Here is a guide to selecting insulation for different parts of a house, identified in the diagram below.
Wayne Groszko
Wayne Groszko is a consultant, researcher, and teacher in Energy Sustainability with 13 years of experience. He has taught at Dalhousie University and the Nova Scotia Community College, in the Faculties of Engineering, Environmental Science, and Energy Sustainability Engineering Technology. Wayne is also President of the Community Energy Cooperative of New Brunswick, and has worked as Renewable Energy Coordinator with the Ecology Action Centre in Nova Scotia. He holds a B.Sc. (Hon.) from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. from Dalhousie University.
