Properly insulating your home: where to start?

If you feel a persistent cold in your home,  have trouble heating a room, and have the impression of living in the middle of drafts, your home is likely subject to heat loss. 

If you're struggling to keep your home cooler during the hotter months and feel like the sun is piercing through into your roof, your home is vulnerable, not insulated/ has gaps where heat can penetrate through.

Heat loss is energy loss when the outside temperature is lower than the inside temperature: the heat escapes from your home through its weak points.

In a poorly insulated building, heat losses are distributed on average as follows:

• The roof: 30 to 35%

• Exterior walls: 20 to 25%

• Air infiltration and ventilation: 20 to 25%

• Glazed walls (windows, windows, etc.): 10 to 15%

• The low floor: 7 to 10%

• Thermal bridges (junction points in the building structure): 5 to 10

The thermal insulation of a building is comprised of 3 main elements: the energy efficiency of the building, the nature of the building, and the optimization of the living space. Several techniques meet different needs and constraints depending on the area that you want to insulate. Let's review these other insulation techniques, section by section.

Insulating the roof space is one of the best 'investments' one could make when designing a building. Isover has a range of insulation solutions to insulate your roof/ceiling space:

• Aerolite^_® Soft Touch Ceiling insulation
• Factoryboard®
• Factorylight®
• Cineplex
• Soundlight®
• Energylight®
• Minerval™ A

The choice of insulation product depends on the application, legislation requirements, location, type of building to name a few. 

With thermal insulation from the inside, each room can be isolated in sequence, even if it is obviously preferable to insulate all the dwelling walls in a single operation to obtain better energy performance and optimize the work cost.

The low floor (on a crawl space or the ground) is another source of loss. 7 to 10% of the heat is lost through the floor. The thermal insulation of the lower floor must, in this case, be considered and the solutions put in place vary according to the nature of the floor and its configuration (heating or not).

For a floor on grade, the insulation installation is done by adding a layer of insulation, often in the form of a rigid material (synthetic or mineral wool), before the installation of a screed and the floor covering wish.

For a floor under a crawl space, the installation of insulation can be done from above as for the floor on the ground or from below, in the crawl space, depending on its accessibility.