Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing Insulation
Focusing Just on R-Value Alone
We all see R-value comparisons time and time again. It's hypnotic. It can easily sway you to going back to comparing apples to bananas. There's more to insulation performance than just R-value.
Keep that in mind, and ask how the insulation performs against air leaks, moisture, mold, and pests.
Neglecting the Whole System
The walls and ceilings, roofs and crawlspaces in a building make up a complex system. Let's call it an organism. There's even more to it because you have heating and cooling ducts, air handlers, air conditioners, vapor barriers and more exotic surprises to think about.
The truth is most of this is pretty logical and fairly simple and straightforward. You just need to avoid neglecting the whole system — it's not just a wall or an attic. They're parts of a complex ballet
Houses Must Breathe
We've all heard this one countless times, right? Ask your contractor and he'll probably tell you the same thing. Let's think about what this means.
It means that air from outside must come in and air inside must go out. Now, you don't draw your breathing air from the electrical sockets in your home, do you? Presumably you go out through a door, open the windows when it's nice, vent your dryer and stove, and so on. That's enough opening to let in clean fresh breathable air for you and your family and let out the moisture your body expels.
So what besides you needs to breathe in your home? The insulation that absorbs water of course!
Therefore, if you have the cheaper insulations, you're forced to leave enough room in your walls for air to escape and outside air to come in. So, in the winter the air you heated needs to escape and the cold outside air needs to come in. In the summer the air you just cooled needs to escape and the warm air outside needs to come in. All to dry out the wet insulation!
Yikes. This doesn't sound reasonable at all! And do you remember what crushes R-value in cheaper insulations?
Air and moisture! Convection! It's a deadly circle that will absolutely cost you tens of thousands of dollars in energy over your lifetime. That doesn't include the costs to redo your insulation time and time again as it molds.
Insulation Should be Cheap
How did we get this belief? Homes are definitely not cheap. Energy is no longer cheap and won't be for at least 50 years. Why do we expect the very things that control and contain this energy in our homes and buildings to be cheap?
It must be that energy was once so inexpensive. Customers tell us every day about how their builder used no insulation or the cheapest possible (imagine fiberglass in a house next to the ocean where the wind whips the spray through the wood and into the insulation).
The cheaper insulations offset only a small cost of energy so it made sense. Back then, energy was cheap. Therefore a larger investment in insulation back then would take longer to be paid back in energy savings. Plus, America is pretty late to the green party so very few people cared if a house was energy efficient or not.
Do your insulation once and do it right. It's not something you see every day and once the drywall is up you won't want to take it back down.
Misunderstanding Payback Periods
This is a huge one. Recently a consumer told us that 2 years was too long to get all his money back. If he understood Payback periods, he'd understand that he was turning down a 50% return on his money.
Now, investments that return 50% every year are EXTREMELY RARE and frankly quite exotic. The S&P used to average 8%. Homes used to gain 3% a year. So here is someone who thinks 50% is too low because he doesn't understand money and he doesn't understand investments.
The truth is a 50% return on an investment in your building's insulation is possible. But let's look at other common scenarios:
| Time until your investment is paid off | Rate of Return |
| 36 months / 3 years: | 33% |
| 48 months / 4 years: | 25% |
| 60 months / 5 years: | 20% |
| 72 months / 6 years: | 16% |
| 84 months / 7 years: | 14% |
| 96 months / 8 years: | 12% |
| 108 months / 9 years: | 11% |
| 120 months/ 10 years: | 10% |
Even if it took 10 years to pay for itself (and it often takes less), investing in the right insulation outperforms most other investments out there.
The standard payback is usually between 3-4 years. That means that the proper investment can yield somewhere between 25 -33%. Too bad it's a limited amount of money you can, or need to, put into your home's insulation. And you're not really investing in insulation per se, you're investing in avoiding energy costs and your home's comfort and value.
Choosing Only on Price
In a world of thinking R-values are King and confusion between options, most people default to price. That's a disaster. Why? Because the lowest price insulations are often the very sources of the problems people are trying to solve.
Mold, moisture, high energy bills, noises, rodents and insects, drafts, allergies, worries. These are the problems people want to solve with insulation. When they choose on price it has NOTHING to do with addressing any of these problems.
What's the net result? A huge waste of money and they're no closer to solving the problem that's driving them to action in the first place. Yikes.