Improve Your Heating System Instead of Over Insulating Your Home

The last few winters have been unusually cold throughout most of the country, which could be indicative of a long-term trend. Homeowners throughout the country are taking new steps to keep their homes warmer during the winter. Many consumers are trying to add more insulation to minimize heating costs, but this can be surprisingly counterproductive. If you are having difficulty keeping your home warm, then you should consider upgrading your heating system rather than over insulating your house.

Why is Over Insulation a Problem?

Human beings have a tendency to believe that there is a linear correlation between things. Since insulation tends to keep houses warmer, they believe that increasing it is always a good way to improve heating efficiency.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work as effectively as people would like to think. There is a point where adding more insulation stops improving heating efficiency. In fact, over insulating your house will eventually make your house less heat efficient.

This may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense if you understand the principles of both conductive and convective heating. According Denver roofers increasing the thickness of your insulation will reduce the heat that is lost to conductive heat transfer. However, since convective heat transfer is determined by surface area, adding more insulation will cause you to lose more heat from convection. While the net benefit is positive initially, there is a point where the heat loss from convection makes adding addition insulation counterproductive.

How Much Insulation is Necessary?

There are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration when deciding whether or not to add more insulation. Rosie Romero gave some helpful tips on AZ Central that you should look into:

• The attic is usually the best place to add new insulation, since most heat is lost through the top of the house.
• You should make sure that there is a continuous layer of insulation. You shouldn’t see any patches of wood around the crawlspace.
• You generally won’t want to renovate your property to add more space for insulation.

Adding more insulation is often the best course of action if you live in an older home. However, there will be a point where you will need to consider an alternative course of action. Your best options are repairing any problems that are causing drafts or improving the efficiency of your heating system.

Benefits of Improving Your Heating System

Renovating your heating system can be tremendously beneficial, especially if oil prices start to rise in the future. If your house is already optimally insulated and you have already repaired any structural problems that have caused drafts, then fixing your heating system is often the only thing that you can do to reducing heating costs.

Fortunately, the experts at Mitchell Heating can help. They can install home heating equipment to boost efficiency and save considerable amounts of money in heating costs down the road.