Garage Insulation
Serving the Boise Area
Garage Too Hot This Summer?
We Can Help.
With summer highs in the 100s and winter lows well below freezing, you’d think that garage insulation would be standard in the Boise area, but it’s not.
Learn how insulating your garage will make it a space you can comfortably use year-round.
or keep scrolling to learn more about insulating your home’s garage
How Insulation Works to Keep Your Garage Comfortable Year-Round
Your garage’s insulation is the thermal barrier between your garage’s interior and the outdoors, keeping the heat out in the summer and holding it in during the winter.
You can think of insulation working by soaking up heat like a sponge soaks up water. The same way that a thicker sponge can soak up more water before it starts leaking through, deeper insulation can soak up more heat before it starts leaking through your garage’s ceiling and walls.
A well-insulated Garage Will give you:
Cooler Summers
Summer temperatures are often in the 90s and above in the Boise area, and your attic will climb above 160F on a sunny summer day. Insulation stops that heat before it can make its way into your garage, making it a space you can use all summer long.
Warmer Winters
A space heater can do a great job of pumping heat into your garage, but if there’s nothing holding that heat in it’ll never have the chance to get warm. Insulation holds the heat in where you want it instead of letting it pass out through the ceiling and walls.
Less Noise Inside & Out
Whether you’re just trying to keep road noise out or don’t want to worry about bothering your neighbors during those late nights and early mornings of getting stuff done, insulation will reduce the volume coming in and out of your garage.
Why Choose Us for Your Garage Insulation Project?
See What Our Past Customers Have to Say
Want to Know How Garage Insulation Is Installed?
Here’s How We Insulate Your Garage
The Right Way to Insulate A Garage Attic
6 Key Points We Focus On When Installing Attic Insulation in Your Garage
All garage attic insulation installs are not created equal – these are the 6 key points we keep in mind when insulating your attic.
1. Air Seal First (whenever possible)
Insulation is a great thermal barrier but does very little to stop air flow, making air-sealing electrical, plumbing, & duct penetrations in your attic floor, along with every wall top plate, a crucial step in your home’s attic insulation system. Local building code started requiring these places to be air sealed in homes built after 2006, but modern garages are almost never sealed. Whenever we’re installing insulation in an empty attic, this is the first step of the process.
Effectively air-sealing the attic floor isn’t possible if you already have insulation in your attic, In this case, air-sealing your garage from the inside is the way to solve the problem.
2. Keep Your Soffit Vents Open
The vents around the soffit of your roof (known as soffit vents) serve as the intake for your attic’s ventilation. We install baffles between your roof’s trusses at each soffit vent to keep them clear of insulation and make sure your attic ventilation stays open to airflow.
3. Install to the True R-Value Desired
A material’s R-value is a measure of its thermal resistance – you can think of it as the “insulating power” of the material. Each brand of insulation needs to be installed to a specific depth and density (usually measured in bags of material per 1000 square feet) to reach a target R-value. This combination of depth and density for each R-value is known as a material’s coverage chart. Find more information for the material we install, Owens Corning L77 Loosefill Fiberglass, here.
It’s easy to accidentally (or intentionally) “stretch” the coverage of blown-in insulation by over-conditioning it, which is just industry speak for making it extra fluffy. This results in insulation that looks to be the right depth but isn’t dense enough, leaving you with less R-value than you want.
Installing insulation rulers throughout your attic, installing above the minimum required depth, and keeping track of how many bags of insulation we install in your attic makes sure we’re providing a final product that provides the R-value you asked for or greater.
4. Build an Access Barrier
The last thing you want is to get covered in a shower of insulation when you open your attic access. That’s why we install a barrier around the edge of every attic access. This barrier also let’s us install your attic insulation to its full-depth all the way up to the edge of your attic access.
We typically construct these access barriers out of the same heavy-duty cardboard that we use for baffles (have you seen the price of lumber lately?). We do also offer an option to upgrade to a solid, framed-in plywood access barrier for anyone who plans on getting into their attic often and wants the extra support.
5. Insulate the Access Cover
If you’re insulating your attic it should be your entire attic, including the often ignored piece of drywall that serves as the cover for your attic access.
We insulate every attic access cover with a piece of batt insulation that matches the R-value of the rest of your attic. This gives your entire attic a consistent insulation level without any gaps or low points, without getting showered with insulation when you open the access.
6. Double Check Your Vents
We install baffles to keep your intake vents clear, but it’s always a good idea to take an extra step to make sure that nothing is blocking them – whether it be stray insulation that found its way past the baffles during the install or decades of dust buildup that has never been cleaned. That’s why we blow out every soffit vent from outside of your home once your attic insulation install is complete, ensuring your attic ventilation is functioning at its best.
The Right Way to Insulate Your Garage Walls
5 Things We Focus On When Insulating Your Garage Walls
There’s a lot that can go wrong when insulating walls if you don’t know what you’re doing. These are the 5 things we focus on to make sure we leave you with garage walls that are perfectly insulated.
1. Prepare For a Mess
Insulating existing walls is always a messy process, from drywall dust to stray insulation. That’s why we put extra care into our prepwork, doing everything we can to contain the mess and make our final cleanup a breeze. As with every type of project we work on, we make sure to leave your home just as clean as we found it.
2. Drill Holes Between Your Wall’s Studs
We’re going to be drilling a hole into each framing cavity of the wall we’re insulating, so knowing where the studs are is important. While we can usually count on most studs being 16 inches apart, framing around doors, windows, and near the outer ends of walls will often be irregularly spaced.
Marking stud locations helps us make sure that every hole we drill is near the center of each framing cavity, making the next step of the process a breeze.
3. Fill The Wall Completely
Gaps in a wall’s insulation will bring down the effective R-value of the wall as a whole, so making sure that each framing cavity in the wall is entirely filled with dense-packed insulation is key.
This is where our experience comes into play – after having insulated hundreds of walls, we know how long it takes to completely fill each wall cavity with the specific equipment and material we use. If we feel one part of your wall filling up more quickly than expected, we know that something is stopping the insulation from filling the entire wall cavity – whether it be the odd framing cross-member, a horizontal pipe, or a loop of wire. When this happens, we drill a second fill-hole below the obstruction to make sure that the entire cavity gets filled, leaving your wall insulation with zero gaps.
4. Don’t Damage the Drywall
Drywall is pretty strong, but a commercial insulation blower is stronger – if you’re not careful you can easily pack insulation into your wall so tight that it causes the drywall to bow or crack.
This is another issue that’s easily solved by our experience – we know how to calibrate our equipment to minimize the risk of damaging your wall and keep a close eye out for any signs of the drywall shifting as we blow insulation into your walls.
5. Patch Your Wall Properly
Now that your walls are insulated, it’s time to make them look good again. We patch the fill-holes we put in your walls with the same circles of drywall we cut out in the first place, securing them with pieces of 1×2 and smoothing them over with drywall compound to leave them ready for any necessary finishing touches. We stick to what we’re best at so we don’t apply any texture or paint, but we’re happy to give you a recommendation for a painter or handy-man.
Ready to Get Started?
You Have Questions?
We Have Answers.
What does “R-Value” mean?
The R-value of a material is a measure of its thermal resistance – you can think of it as the “insulating power” of the material. The higher the R-value, the greater the insulating power!
How much attic insulation do I need in my garage?
What R-value should my garage attic be?
What R-value should my garage attic be?
How much insulation you should install in your garage largely depends on how you like to use the space. Someone who just wants their garage to be safe to store pantry items doesn’t need as much insulation as someone who wants to be able to comfortably work in their garage on a hot summer afternoon or cold winter morning.
Here’s a breakdown of the three garage attic insulation levels we typically recommend:
Good: R-30 (10.5″ deep) – “Make it Bearable” – The “minimum effective dose” for sufficiently keeping attic heat out of the typical garage in the summer and holding it during the winter.
Better: R-38 (13.25″ deep) – “Make it Usable” – The happy medium where you’ll be able to use your garage for extended periods for most of the year, but it’ll still get quite warm out there on a hot summer afternoon.
Best: R-49 (16.75″ deep) – “Make it Comfortable” – For those who want to be able to comfortable use their garage day or night, all year-round.
What’s more important,
insulation depth or R-value?
insulation depth or R-value?
R-Value! Insulation depth means nothing without knowing the R-value of the material.
For example, when installed to manufacturer’s specifications blown-in fiberglass insulation produced by CertainTeed requires a minimum installed depth of 18.25 inches to achieve an R-49 while Owens Corning’s blown-in fiberglass only requires a minimum depth of 16.75 inches.
What is the best type of attic insulation?
Is fiberglass or cellulose insulation better?
Is fiberglass or cellulose insulation better?
Blown-in fiberglass insulation is a much better choice than cellulose for attic insulation in terms of both upfront cost and long-term performance.
This is a long-standing debate in the insulation industry that takes a lot more than a couple of lines to fully explain, but the short answer is that improvements in the material science of fiberglass insulation production and the deterioration of the source material quality for cellulose insulation (recycled newsprint) means that modern fiberglass insulation is a much better choice than cellulose in the vast majority of cases.
What type of attic insulation do you install?
We install blown-in fiberglass and fiberglass batt insulation.
Is batt/roll or blown-in insulation better for my attic?
Blown-in insulation is almost always a much better choice than batts when insulating an attic for two main reasons:
- More Even Coverage – batt insulation leaves gaps around attic framing, pipes, and wires, leading to thermal bridging and resulting in a lower effective R-value than the even, consistent coverage achieved by blown-in insulation
- Lower Labor Cost To Install – properly installing batt insulation requires a lot of time spent cutting material around framing, wiring, pipes, and vents while blowing in insulation is a much more routine process
How long does it take to insulate an attic?
In most cases we can complete a garage attic insulation project in 2-4 hours. The time it takes to insulate an attic ultimately depends on the size and complexity of the space, but you can typically expect us to be working in your garage for less than half a day.
How do I know if my garage walls are insulated?
Exterior garage walls are rarely insulated, even in brand new homes. (If building code doesn’t require something a builder probably isn’t going to spend the money to do it, even if it would be useful). Code only requires the shared wall between your home and garage to be insulated.
The only way to be 100% sure if a wall in your garage is insulated is to check for yourself. The easiest & least destructive way to do this is to drill a small hole (3/8″ is usually a good size) in the wall you’d like to check. While drilling your “check hole”, push the drill bit all the way into the wall (aim to go about 2″ deep) and keep the drill running as you pull it out. If the wall is insulated, this should make the drill bit grab a bit of insulation on its way out so you can see what’s in there without trying to peek through that tiny hole.
How long will it take you to insulate my walls?
In most cases we can complete a wall insulation project in 4-6 hours.
What R-Value can you insulate existing walls to?
We can insulate walls with 2×4 framing to R-15 and walls with 2×6 framing to R-21 – the same R-Values that can be reached when installing batt insulation into walls during the initial construction process.
Can you add more insulation to walls that are already insulated?
When there’s already insulation in a wall, there’s nothing that we can do to add more. In this case you have two main options:
- Option 1: Injection spray foam
- – Pro: In theory, injection spray foam can work its way past the existing insulation in your walls then push it out of the way as it expands.
- – Con: We’ve heard mixed results from people who have had this done, and it is quite expensive.
- Option 2: Remove the drywall and start from scratch
- – Pro: You can insulate your wall perfectly (how your builder should have done it in the first place).
- – Con: You’ll have to tear-down the drywall on every wall you want to re-insulate, then install new drywall and re-finish the wall when you’re done.
What type of wall insulation do you install?
We install blown-in fiberglass insulation into existing walls (ones that have already been drywalled and finished) and can install either blown-in fiberglass or fiberglass batt insulation into open walls that have not yet had drywall installed.
What is the best type of insulation for walls?
Should I use fiberglass or cellulose?
Should I use fiberglass or cellulose?
Blown-in fiberglass insulation is a much better choice than cellulose for attic insulation in terms of both upfront cost and long-term performance.
Cellulose insulation settles up to 20% over time, leaving the top of your walls with a major gap in their insulation after a few years. Modern fiberglass insulation doesn’t settle at all, so your walls will stay just as efficient years down the road as they were the day they were first insulated.