Adding insulation to your Peoria home is one of the best investments you can make. Adding insulation will help to keep your home more comfortable, reduce your energy costs, and increase your home’s value. However, all of these benefits assume that the insulation is installed correctly. Therefore, to receive the maximum benefit from your investment, it’s wise to have the pros at Bratcher Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc. take-on your insulation installation project, even if you won’t get the satisfaction of doing the project yourself.
Risk to Your Personal Safety
Though the process of adding insulation is fairly straightforward, the places you have to access to add the insulation can be quite unforgiving. For example, if you are trying to install insulation in your attic during the summer, you could be dealing with temperatures that reach 150 to 160 degrees F.
These temperatures are dangerous for anyone, but especially for those who aren’t accustomed to working in such extreme conditions. In addition, you could encounter other hazards in your attic, such as exposed electrical wires, sharp roofing nails, falls through the ceiling, and more. Therefore, if you value your safety, it makes sense to have Bratcher Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc. handle the job.
Risk to Your Family’s Safety
One of the most popular and efficient types of insulation is spray foam insulation. This insulation uses a mixture of two chemicals that expand upon contact due to a chemical reaction. While spray-foam insulation is completely safe in the hands of a professional, this process is not at all do-it-yourself friendly.
One major hazard is that you could mix the chemicals improperly. If you do, the expansion will still take place, but the insulation will release toxic vapors into the air in your home, which will put your family at risk. Additionally, it can be quite easy to put too much foam into a certain space, which could cause the framing in that space to crack and break, leading to a structural failure.
It’s Easy to Miss Steps in the Process
Long before insulation can be added to a space, it must be completely sealed to ensure the greatest gains in energy efficiency. In an attic, this process includes sealing around all attic deck protrusions, adding baffles at the edges of the roof to allow for proper airflow, creating weighted insulation for attic doors, and much more.
If you miss any steps in this process, you’ll still experience energy gains, but you’ll also continue to waste quite a bit of energy that will increase the time it takes to see a return on your investment. Plus, missing certain steps could cause your attic to be exposed to the elements, which could result in a shorter lifespan for the insulation that you install.
It Can Be Difficult to Remove Old Insulation
In many cases, you’ll want to remove the old insulation from the space before adding the new insulation. This is to ensure that you don’t miss any mold or mildew that may be growing in the old insulation. It also gives you a fresh start to have consistent R-values across your entire attic.
However, removing old insulation is no walk in the park. Given its composition, you need to use specialized tools like those that Bratcher Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc. has in order to prevent fiberglass dust from entering your home; fiberglass dust can cause serious respiratory issues for you and your family. Plus, without the proper tools, removing old insulation will take a long time, which will significantly increase the time it takes to finish your project.
We’re Here to Keep You Comfortable
At Bratcher Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc., we’re proud of the number of services that we offer to help keep you and your family comfortable. In addition to insulation upgrades, we also offer repair, maintenance, and installation services for furnaces and air conditioners. To increase your home’s comfort during a long and cold winter, we offer fireplace installation as one of our services as well. Plus, to keep your HVAC system operating efficiently, we offer expert duct cleaning for homes of all sizes.
Our company has been proud to serve this community for over 35 years. In all that we do, we seek to work with quality and integrity first and foremost, which is why we have received the Angie’s List Super Service Award, the Lennox Premier Dealer Award, and countless five-star reviews from our happy customers. If you want to upgrade your home’s insulation and take your comfort to the next level, feel free to reach out to us at Bratcher Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc. today.
