Quote:
Originally Posted by UNCSoc
...Which would you recommend? Foaming between the rafters or piling the attic high in insulation?
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Your location has everything to do with how much insulation you need, what kind of insulation you need, and how it should be installed.
There is a website called
degree days dot net
That will allow you to easily, and precisely calculate the Heating Degree Days and the Cooling Degree Days value for your own location. The web page will also explain exactly what it means and how it is derived.
In the previous posts, you have been given information by some very experienced people. However their experience is very much influenced by their location.
I'm just going to do a wild guess that you are in the RALEIGH-DURHAM area. Weather conditions, wind, humidity, solar insolation vary greatly even over a fairly small area, so you should not take my example as applying to you, you should re-calculate for your exact location.
For the location I guessed, your Heating and Cooling Degree days look like this:
The HDD (on the left) generally indicates how much you need to heat in the winter, and the CDD (on the right) generally indicates how much you need to cool in the summer.
Without knowing exactly what the HDD and CDD of the previous posters is, in their location, I think it is safe to guess that their heating requirements, and insulation requirements are more severe than yours. I'd also guess that their cooling requirements are less, possibly very much less, and maybe none at all.
One of the reasons this is so important is that if you lived someplace, for instance, nearer the shore, in a slightly more southerly location than RALEIGH-DURHAM and in that case lots of air conditioning will be required and a lot of moisture will condense on the outer insulation layers as it make it's way inside. So in that case
moisture condensation control during the cooling season would be hugely important.
This exact kind of problem would be a much greater worry than Alaska.
But there, the exact opposite, condensation forming on the inner layers of the insulation during heating season.
So you need to consider the dominant weather, and if it were me, I would ask around to several local installers to see how they handled things, and also see if your state or local government has information specific to your local conditions.
And then I'd go on-line, look at lots of info, to find out for myself what the optimum arrangement would be for your locale.
Best,
-AC