Home insulation in Tallahassee FL - an upstairs that finally cools down

Most calls start the same way. The upstairs won't cool down, the room over the garage is miserable by July, or the power bill keeps creeping up even though nobody touched the thermostat. Usually it comes back to the attic, either because there isn't much left up there or because air is slipping past what there is, which is why most jobs start with attic insulation. The price moves with the size of the attic, how many inches are already up there, how many gaps need sealing and whether there's a leak or damage to deal with first. The schedule turns on how easy your attic is to get into, what we find once we're up there and whether the job needs a permit. Your own number comes from the estimate, after I've been up there and seen it.

I start in the attic because that's usually where a house is easiest to improve, and the first thing I look for isn't how many inches are up there but where air is getting through. The usual spots are around can lights, plumbing pipes, the attic hatch and the tops of interior walls, and our crew air-seals those, closing every gap before any insulation goes down, because there's no sense putting a quilt on the bed with the barn door open. Then we top up with blown-in insulation, loose fill sent through a hose, building the depth evenly all the way to the edges instead of piling it in the middle, and we keep the eave vents clear so the attic can still breathe. If your heat and air equipment sits up there, I'll explain the different ways to handle it. Foam costs more and seals air while it insulates, so it mostly earns its price when the ductwork lives in the attic, and otherwise sealing the gaps and topping up the loose fill usually wins.

Some houses need more than the attic. If the floors are cold and there's a crawl space under the house, crawl space insulation is the next place I'd look, as long as it's dry down there first. If what's in the attic is soaked from an old roof leak or full of droppings, I'll show you, and we'll talk about insulation removal before anything new goes on top, because covering a problem doesn't fix it.

Permits start with whether your house sits inside the city limits. Inside them, the City of Tallahassee's Growth Management Department issues the permits for building, renovating or expanding a structure, and whether an attic top-up needs one isn't something I'll guess at. We check your address, check with the office that covers it and handle the permit paperwork when the job needs one.

Around here the heat does most of the damage. A lot of the houses we see have the ductwork and air handler up in the attic, which on a summer afternoon is about the hottest room you own, and plenty of older houses still have a thin layer that's settled flat over the years. The humidity is the other half of it, so I watch the eave vents and the crawl space closely, because a buried vent or a damp crawl space ends up as moisture in the framing. We see the same houses and the same problems on jobs in Bradfordville and Quincy.