Attic air sealing in Tallahassee FL - rooms that stop leaking air into the attic

Most folks call me because the upstairs won't cool down, the room over the garage has its own weather, or the power bill keeps creeping up, and they figure they need more insulation. Maybe they do, but insulation slows heat and doesn't stop air, so piling more over a leaky attic floor is like adding blankets with the window open. That's why sealing usually rides along as the first step of an attic insulation job. The price moves with how many holes there are and how big, how much old insulation is in the way and how tight the attic is to crawl around in, and the schedule moves with whether anything needs fixing first and whether your address needs a permit. You get your own number after I've been up there and looked.

We start by checking what's underneath, because sealing over a roof leak or a bath fan blowing into the attic only traps the problem. Then we work across the attic floor, moving old insulation where it's in the way so we can get at the holes around wires, pipes, the hatch and the light fixtures, and we seal each one. Insulation that's soaked or full of droppings doesn't go back, since it would keep the problem, and the rest goes back level, full depth out to the edges and clear of the eave vents so the attic can still breathe. Before we leave, we show you what we sealed and why.

Once the floor is sealed, plenty of attics are ready for more on top, and our retrofit insulation work adds it to a house that's already built. Spray foam insulation seals and insulates at once, but it costs more, so I usually steer people toward sealing the gaps and topping up loose fill unless the ductwork lives in the attic, which is where foam starts earning its keep.

Inside the city limits, building permits come from the City of Tallahassee's Building Inspection Division, which issues the permits for building, renovating or expanding a structure and takes questions about specific permit types. If your house sits outside the city limits, the city sends you to Leon County's Development Services Department instead. Whether sealing an attic on its own needs a permit isn't something I'll guess at, so before we start we find out which side of the line your address falls on and ask the office that covers it.

The calls we get around here mostly sound alike: a hot upstairs, a bonus room over the garage, a ceiling dotted with can lights added over the years and a hatch with nothing but gravity holding it shut. We see the same mix on jobs in Bradfordville and Crawfordville, and older houses there take longer too, because there are more holes and more old insulation to work through.