The ceiling below your attic should serve as a barricade that keeps the outside air that resides in the attic from entering your home’s living space. But there are often points along this barricade where openings exist, and air leakage occurs. These points are also known as bypass areas, and each bypass area reduces the energy efficiency of your home, leading to energy and heat loss, poor indoor comfort, and high energy costs.
These problems can be avoided by taking the time to properly air seal your attic space. Here are six ways that attic air sealing makes a difference with our guide below.
1. Air Sealing Makes Your Attic Insulation More Effective
Insulation is an essential ingredient in maintaining a level of warmth in your home during Colorado’s cold weather months and keeping things cool during the summer.
Most insulation materials, however, do not prevent air from moving through them and coming into your home. In fact, moving air often makes attic insulation less effective and reduces the benefits the insulation should provide. Air sealing your attic space also works to reduce the flow of air through the insulation. It places a protective shield around the insulation and prevents bypass areas from forming.
Schedule a Home Energy Audit
One way to know if there are bypass areas in your insulation is to have a home energy audit or commercial energy audit done. An audit helps identify the ways you can increase the health and safety of the occupants in your home or building while increasing the comfort level and structural durability of the building as well.
2. Attic Air Sealing Reduces the “Stack Effect”
The stack effect is a building science concept that explains how air moves through a building. In the winter, warmer indoor air rises up through the different levels of a home, continuing into the attic through the bypass areas, cracks, and other crevices that are present. Areas around recessed lighting fixtures, drop-down attic stairs, and wall cavities where electrical wiring and plumbing lines run are common sources of air leaks and energy loss.
How the Stack Effect Happens
As warm air moves into the attic space, colder outside winter air gets pulled into your living space, creating a cooler temperature for the home. You can feel the stack effect in action when you notice a draft near an exterior wall or window space.
Having warm air escape your home and cold air come in requires your heating unit to work twice as hard to heat your living space. This produces higher energy bills in the winter months which is a greater cost to you. Air sealing your attic reduces the stack effect and helps avoid unnecessary energy waste.
3. Air Sealing Your Attic Reduces Moisture and Mold Growth
When there are bypass areas, cracks, crevices, or openings of any kind that allows air to pass between your living space and the attic, it opens the door for moisture entering into the attic as well. Each time you shower, cook, or do laundry, moisture enters into the air and travels up to the attic.
Why Is Moisture in Your Attic a Bad Thing?
Once in your attic, the moisture and humid air can condense and lead to mold or mildew growth in your attic. When left unchecked, mold and mildew will cause poor indoor air quality in your home. This may cause long-term health issues for you and other residents. By air sealing your attic, you are preventing moisture from reaching the attic and forming harmful deposits of mold or mildew.
4. Air Sealing Keeps Attic Air Out of Your Living Spaces
The air in your attic space can contain toxins and other harmful pollutants that come from asbestos, mold or mildew, and fiberglass particles. If your attic has air leaks, cracks, and small openings, that polluted and unhealthy attic air can get into your house and living spaces.
Breathing in Toxins
This makes it possible for the toxins and other harmful particles to become something you breathe in on a regular basis. You and others residing in your home may experience health issues as a result. To prevent the attic air from mixing with your living space’s air, you need to seal your attic.
5. Air Sealing Decreases Indoor Drafts
Any unnatural flow of air from your attic into your living space will create a draft. Air drafts also happen in recessed lighting fixture spaces, the opening around an overhead attic door, and the spaces between the walls where electrical and plumbing systems run.
Why Attic Air Sealing Is Worth It
Sealing a drafty attic works to close off any open stud cavities, gaps behind a knee wall, and any other major gaps of space that are present. It will reduce the presence of drafts, which may currently be impacting your gas and electricity bills each month.
6. Improves Home Energy Efficiency
Each gap, crevice, or crack in your attic allows air to escape into your home. It also allows warmer, healthier air from your living space to escape into the attic.
Keep Heat Where It Belongs
During the winter months, your home’s heating system will be unable to keep up with heating the air inside your home since there will always be new cooler outdoor air being introduced through these air leaks. Air sealing your attic creates a barrier inside your attic that keeps the cold air where it belongs. As a result, you will see lower electric bills and have a more energy-efficient home for years to come. In this sense, any attic air sealing costs can be recouped through your monthly energy savings.
Does Your Attic Need to Be Air Sealed? Schedule a Home Energy Audit with e3 Power!
By scheduling an e3 Power home energy audit for your Denver home, you’ll learn more about the severity of air leaks in your home and the specific places that air sealing should be performed, as well as other cost-effective ways to improve energy efficiency and reduce utility bills, like insulation upgrades.
e3 Power is Denver’s leading energy auditor, and we take our building science seriously. Unlike other contractors who are often just using energy audits to get their foot in the door and upsell you on more expensive services, e3 Power is a completely independent auditor, and there’s no financial incentive for us to find “problems” that don’t actually exist. If you’re looking for accurate data and expert advice on what to do about high energy bills, indoor drafts, or unhealthy air in your home, talk to our team today.
