You may have a basketball-sized hole in your house.
Little air leaks in your house are annoying. You feel them when you get out of bed in the morning. We are all too familiar with your feet hitting the ice cold floor caused by a tiny leak in your bedroom window. The cool air pools low to the ground and the balls of your feet instantly shrink back into the comfort of your warm bed. You see the effect of a small air leak on your bathroom window as ice crystals form interesting frost patterns on the frame and wall surrounding the window as the steam from your shower freezes. You can smell the heat of summer as it penetrates through minuscule holes in your roof and the humidity and heat seep in causing sleeping to become impossible in the heat of July. Your pocketbook feels the pain as well when the implication of your air conditioning cooling off the world around your house through leaky walls becomes a reality.
The point is we all look at these individual instances of leaks in our house and think it is not a big deal. What I would like to point out to you is that while the individual instances of these leaks seem small, you need to consider what the sum-total of the effect is. Once all the leaks are identified and you can understand the total impact the problem becomes clear. Each individual leak may only be a fraction of an inch, but when you take the sum total it is like having a hole the size of a basketball in your house.
If you noticed a large hole in the side of your house, you would immediately see a problem, and address it. Just like if you have a broken window, or a door that doesn’t lock, or a drain that needs to be unclogged you need to make sure you’re taking care of issues as they appear. Over time more and more leaks can appear and the longer they remain unaddressed the larger the overall impact becomes as well as the greater the potential physical damage and damage to your pocketbook.
We at Northstar Insulating can run a series of tests to assess just how many “leaks” there are in your house and help you identify where you’re losing your air seal. Very often this component is overlooked when looking at insulation quality but we consider it foundational to any insulation system. Our state of the art spray foam insulation provides excellent air-seal qualities and goes a long way to plugging the sum-total basketball-sized hole in your house.
