Retrofit insulation in Los Banos CA - comfortable rooms in the house you have

Most people who call me have a hot room upstairs, cold floors in winter, or an attic nobody has looked at in years, in a house built before anyone thought much about what went in the walls. Your price turns on how many square feet we cover, whether it's the attic alone or the walls too, which material goes in, and how much air sealing, closing up the gaps where air leaks through, the house needs first. The schedule mostly turns on what I find on the first visit, because old wiring or a wet spot gets dealt with before any insulation goes in. The written estimate puts each part of the job on its own line, so you can see what's moving your number.

On a retrofit, I look before anybody talks numbers. In an older home I check for knob and tube wiring, the old wiring strung on porcelain knobs, and how the attic runs over the garage, because both change the size of the job. The national electrical code doesn't allow insulation on or around knob and tube, so if your house has it, we work out a plan for it before anything goes in. Then we seal the gaps around pipes, wires and the attic hatch, since insulation laid over open gaps just fights a draft. In the attic we blow in loose fill, insulation sent through a hose, across the whole ceiling and out to the edges, with baffles at the eaves so the vents stay open and the attic keeps breathing. If the walls need it, we fill them last, through small holes that don't tear much up.

When the ductwork runs through the attic, spray foam insulation can be worth the extra cost, because it seals air while it insulates and that matters when the ducts are up there. For most houses, though, sealing the gaps and topping up loose fill is the better buy, and that's what most of our attic insulation work looks like.

California's Energy Code splits the state into climate zones, and several of the standards for a home's walls, roof and floors depend on which zone the house sits in. So what makes sense for your attic depends partly on where the house is, and we work to the zone your house falls in.

We're based in Los Banos and work in the cities around it, and a lot of what we see is older one-story homes with an attached garage, a vented attic and walls that were never filled. Some sit on raised floors, and the state's guidance there is to fasten netting or mesh under the joists to hold the insulation up and to leave the foundation vents uncovered so the space under the house can still breathe. We see the same kinds of houses on jobs in Dos Palos and Newman, and we do the work the same way there.