LEXINGTON Blog

Understanding How Insulation Works in Lexington

Insulation in your home provides resistance to heat flow and lowers your heating and cooling costs. Properly insulating your home not only reduces heating and cooling costs, but also improves comfort.

How Does Insulation Work

To understand how insulation works it helps to understand heat flow, which involves three basic mechanisms -- conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction is the way heat moves through materials, such as when a spoon placed in a hot cup of coffee conducts heat through its handle to your hand. Convection is the way heat circulates through liquids and gasses, and is why lighter, warmer air rises, and cooler, denser air sinks in your home. Radiant heat travels in a straight line and heats anything solid in its path that absorbs its energy.

Regardless, heat flows from warmer to cooler areas until there is no longer a temperature difference. In your home, this means that in winter, heat flows directly from all heated living spaces to adjacent unheated attics, garages, basements, and especially to the outdoors. Heat flow can also move indirectly through interior ceilings, walls, and floors--wherever there is a difference in temperature. During the cooling season, heat flows from the outdoors to the interior of a house.

To maintain comfort, the heat lost in the winter must be replaced by your heating system and the heat gained in the summer must be removed by your cooling system. Properly insulating your home will decrease this heat flow by providing an effective resistance to the flow of heat.

Types of Insulation

To choose the best insulation for your home from the many types of insulation on the market, you’ll need to know where you want or need to install the insulation, and what R-value you want the installation to achieve. Other considerations may include indoor air quality impacts, life cycle costs, recycled content, embodied carbon, and ease of installation.

Insulation Materials

Insulation materials run the gamut from bulky fiber materials such as fiberglass, rockwool, cellulose, and natural fibers to rigid foam boards to sleek foils. Bulky materials resist conductive heat flow in a building cavity. Rigid foam boards trap air or another gas in their cells to resist conductive heat flow. Highly reflective foils in radiant barriers and reflective insulation systems reflect radiant heat away from living spaces, making them particularly useful in cooling climates.

Professionally installed insulation will save you money in the future and put less demand on your energy resources. It will help to keep the temperature instead of your home consistent from room to room. Our experts at Koala Insulation of Lexington are here to help get your home running more comfortable all while saving you money on your energy bills.