8 Signs Your Home Is Under-Insulated

Under-insulated homes rarely announce themselves. They just quietly cost more and feel worse, winter after winter, until the owners assume that’s how the house is. It isn’t. Here are the eight signs we look for on Twin Cities homes — most of them checkable without leaving your living room.

The signs

1. Rooms that never match the thermostat. A bedroom over the garage that’s freezing, a bonus room nobody uses in January. Uneven temperatures are the classic symptom of uneven (or missing) insulation.

2. Cold walls, floors and ceilings. Put your palm flat on an exterior wall on a cold day. It should feel roughly room temperature. If it’s noticeably cold — or the ceiling under the attic is — heat is leaving through that surface.

3. Heating bills that outrun your neighbors’. Same size house, same thermostat habits, wildly different bill? Insulation and air leakage are the usual difference.

4. Ice dams every winter. We say it in every ice dam consultation: the ridge of ice on your gutters is attic heat escaping. Recurring dams are practically a diagnosis.

5. Uneven snow melt on the roof. After a snowfall, drive past your house. Bare stripes and patches while neighbors’ roofs stay white means warm spots — thin insulation or air bypasses right below.

6. Frozen pipes, or close calls. Pipes in exterior walls that flirt with freezing every polar vortex are telling you the wall cavity has little or nothing in it.

7. Drafts you can feel sitting still. Near outlets on exterior walls, at baseboards, around the attic hatch. Moving air means open pathways, and insulation without air sealing can’t stop it.

8. Visible joists in the attic. The two-second check: if you can see the ceiling framing poking through the insulation, you’re well below the R-60 we insulate to — do it right, do it once.

What to do with a yes

One yes is worth watching. Three or more means the house is spending your money every day the furnace runs — and in our climate, the fix pays for itself faster than almost any other project, especially with the utility rebates we covered in our attic insulation guide. We’ll inspect the attic and walls, measure what’s there, and give you straight numbers. See our insulation services or call (651) 565-1349 for a free assessment.