Proper Air Barriers for Home Insulation

Series Summary

Your home is your castle. Although, there are probably a handful of reasons why your home is better than a castle! Castles are fortified military keeps or noble residences, usually constructed on a hill for the best defensive advantages, and capable of housing the entire population of a town during attack. But, think how hard it would be to unload groceries if your driveway went straight up a hill? And forget about your kids playing basketball outside the garage. At times, constructing a castle took three generations of kings and architects. Three! The house you design today might be ready for your grandchild, if you’re lucky. Indoor plumbing? Not a chance, although many medieval castles had more technologically impressive latrines than many people realize: a bench with a hole in it, in a room that hangs over the lower walls, dropping waste straight into the moat twenty or thirty feet below. Another reason your home is better than a castle? No drafts! If you have proper insulation, your home can be draft free and energy efficient.

In this free instructional video series, expert Joshua Lindsey teaches you how to inspect home insulation to make sure your new home is as green as can be and saves you money! Joshua leads you through a frame-walk, showing you what home insulation looks like, where it goes, and how it helps your wallet. He explains r-value, the unit that measures insulation’s efficiency. Josh will teach you about air barriers, knee walls, insulation around windows, ways to keep your attic more protected, how to check window labels for insulation properties, compression, baffles, and more! Watch this series, and you will be one step closer to saving money on heating and cooling bills and making the earth a safer place for your children… even if they don’t get to inherit a castle.

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Joshua Lindsey with CFM Science Building Solutions. On behalf of Expert Village, we are doing a frame walk and insulation inspection on this home. The first thing we are going to look at is the overall alignment throughout the house. What we are looking at is the overall alignment as we are looking at that the insulation is going to have air barriers on all sides. Let me explain that to you. Right here we've got an air barrier on this side, an air barrier on the right and left, we've got the top plate, the bottom plate. That is four of our air barriers. This is going to number five and when we put the drywall out here on the outside, that is going to be number six. We want six air barriers on everything if we can get it. Obviously, there are some places that we can't get six air barriers. This is one area that is going to be a problem. Right up here we have the sides and we are going to have the bottom air barrier against the insulation. We don't have the top air barrier so we are actually going to have one, two, three and four with the drywall. We are going to only have four air barriers. This is a real problem. At this point, air can flow right through the insulation and the insulation becomes nothing more than a filter filtering the air right into the house. So if you look with an infrared camera, up at this corner once it is drywalled, you are going to see a huge hot spot right there with the infrared camera. It is going to show this big old red spot in the middle of the summer because of the fact that the air is just flowing right through your insulation. Huge problem right there. "