insulation-works / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Insulation slows the rate of heat transfer, helping keep homes warmer in winter and cooler in summer. How well-insulated your home is will determine how comfortable it is and how much you will spend on energy for heating and cooling, and in some respects, how durable it will be. The transfer of heat (or heat loss) occu...

No matter that engineers and architects long ago debunked it, insulating paint still occasionally finds its way into buildings. Powdered ceramic chips that can be added to any paint are said to reflect heat in or out of a building and reduce heat loss by staggering amounts. I was under the impression that this had been...

Not all insulation materials are the same, and they are not always interchangeable A basic understanding of how walls work is needed to help you understand what you can reasonably expect insulation and building materials to do for you when they are part of a wall assembly. If you have a working knowledge of building sc...

First published in ecoHouse Canada The thermal performance of wall assemblies and insulation products has long been characterized using R-value, a metric which describes thermal resistance. While R-value is useful, it doesn’t tell the whole story about heat flow through building enclosures such as walls and roofs. Rece...

Home insulation - how much do you need and where to put it: Think of the heat in your home as if it were water behind a dam, and that insulation levels were the concrete wall of the dam. Would you choose the height of that concrete wall randomly, or would want an even level of concrete to hold back as much water as pos...

Home Insulation - how much is too much? A House can definitely be under-insulated (millions of homes throughout the United States and Canada have this very problem), but can a home have too much insulation? In short, yes it can. In reality, there is an optimal balance between the up-front cost of insulation and the lon...

Crawlspace insulation - be careful to get it right A crawlspace comes with all the downsides of a basement, but it is just too low a space to be functional either beyond the folded plastic christmas tree and a couple of boxes of baubles. Unless there is a good reason for it, going through the process of pouring a footi...

Hemp insulation manufactured in Canada! Nature Fibres is a young company based in the town of Asbestos, Quebec, which began manufacturing hemp insulation in the winter of 2018. As the town’s name suggests, it was heavily reliant on the manufacturing of asbestos, but those mining and manufacturing facilities are closing...

  Insulating a basement is a great idea if it wasn't insulated when built, as before we began insulating foundation walls and below slabs (see slab on grade), it was generally estimated that basement heat loss accounted for about 1/3 of the total heat loss of a house. It is likely that such an abysmal starting place ma...

There are probably only two general desires we share when imagining a dream house - we all want the nicest one possible for the least amount of money. And we want both of those things right away, rather than waiting a lifetime to see the 'payback' for noble design choices we might have made to save polar bears, bees, p...

It is easy to look at the R value rating of a material and assume that our entire wall assembly matches it uniformly. But when you factor in the thermal bridges caused by framing materials and any discontinuities in the wall structure, you can also quickly deduce that this is not the case. It doesn't take expensive equ...