Heating Your New England Home on a Budget, Part 1: Air Sealing

Okay, you’ve heard it a thousand times, insulating your home is the best investment you can make. It’s (relatively) cheap, lowers your heating and cooling bills and is good for the environment. This is all true.

What I’d like to talk about today is insulation's little-known cousin – air sealing.

Everybody is familiar with the idea behind insulation. It keeps the temperature inside your house from changing by making the walls, floors and ceilings pass less heat.

This reduces the loss of radiant heat from the inside to the outside.

Think of it as a nice warm jacket that your house is wearing. I’m going to talk more about insulation in the future, but now let’s move on to air leakage.

If the insulated walls of your house are part of the jacket that keeps your house warm, then air leaks are the holes in that jacket that keep you from being as comfortable as you could. For purposes of this blog, I’m going to refer to a cold weather environment where you are trying to keep the heat in. But the same applies in a hot weather environment, you just are trying to keep your house cool instead of warm.

These air leaks can occur in hundreds of places. Literally any place that there is a penetration in the wall, floor or ceiling of your house can be letting in cold air, or letting out warm air. Some of the common places we see air leakage are:

1) Around recessed lights
2) Around bathroom fans
3) Where water pipes come up from the basement
4) Where heating or cooling ducts or pipes come up from the
basement or down from the attic
5) Where light fixtures or outlets attach to an exterior wall
6) Around doors and windows

You get the idea, they are everywhere. Now that you’re aware of the problem, start looking around your house for potential problem areas.

The bad news: there are going to be a bunch.

The good news: they are very inexpensive to fix.

We’ll address the fixes in our next post.

Photo credit: Energy Star