Top Tips For Preventing Air Leakage In Overland Park Homes

How To Prevent Air Leakage In Overland Park, KS

Most people think of their home, consciously or not, as a self-contained box. This box is protected, and its interior does not mix much with the exterior world. If you want fresh air from outside, you control exactly how much air will enter your home. Or, so you think. In truth, there’s a much greater exchange of interior and exterior air than one might think. Air enters and exits through windows and doors, but even when you think your home is completely shut, you may be surprised by just how many areas of your home are compromised by air leakage. Ventilation is important for a healthy home, but natural ventilation, or uncontrolled ventilation, can lead to higher energy bills, moisture problems and uncomfortable drafts.

A professional Kansas City insulation company can identify air leaks, seal these leaks to prevent energy loss, optimally insulate your home and improve your mechanical ventilation. In this guide by Koala Insulation of South Kansas City, you’ll learn exactly how air leakage in Overland Park occurs, how to prevent it and how to strike a balance between air sealing and proper ventilation.

How Does Air Leakage In A Home Occur?

Air leaks, by definition, are a loss of air (hot or cold) that is unintentional and uncontrolled. Imagine holding a water balloon and puncturing it with the tiniest needle. Even if this hole is minuscule, water will still escape.

This is essentially how an air leakage occurs. If the temperature and humidity on the inside and outside of your home are identical, air leakage in an Overland Park building will not occur, as air pressure is at equilibrium. However, this circumstance rarely occurs. As soon as your home is warmer than the outside temperature, cold air will infiltrate your home. If your home is cooler than the exterior, cold air will exfiltrate your home. Hot and cold air have different pressures, and in an attempt to equalize pressure differences, air will move from the interior to the exterior, and vice versa.

To prevent this from occurring, air barriers are needed. A professional air leakage expert can identify areas where air leakage in your Overland Park home is occurring and seal them.

Areas Where Air Leakage Occurs

If you’re reading this article, you might already suspect that you have air leakage in your home. There may be a particularly cold, drafty spot that you’re concerned is adding to your utility bill during the winter months, or perhaps the temperature feels a little too cool when standing next to your windows. Large areas of air leakage in Overland Park buildings are easy to identify, but you may not realize just how many cracks and crevices in your home are contributing to energy loss within your home. Some areas of concern may include:

• Electrical outlets
• Window frames
• Door frames
• Exhaust fans
• Clothes dryers
• Basement walls
• Exterior walls
• Floor joists
• Crawl spaces
• Fireplace flues
• Plumbing vents
• Attic spaces
• Recessed lighting
• And more

While you may be able to identify some of these areas on your own, hiring a professional to do an energy audit and seal your home according to their findings is the best way to prevent air leakage.

How To Prevent Air Leakage in Overland Park

Preventing air leakage is one of the best investments you can make in your Overland Park home. One of the biggest benefits of air sealing is undoubtedly an increase in your home’s energy efficiency. With less air escaping, your furnace won’t have to work as hard in the winter, and your air conditioning unit won’t run as much in the summer. This translates into significant energy savings through reduced energy bills for you.

Preventing air leakage in Overland Park isn’t as simple as sealing every potential crack and crevice. To properly seal your home while still ensuring high indoor air quality, the following steps should be taken:

Get An Energy Audit

The best way to identify not just air leakage but all the ways in which you can make your home more energy efficient is by hiring a qualified expert to conduct an energy audit of your Overland Park home. During this audit, each room of your home will be thoroughly inspected. Often, your energy bills will also be analyzed to help determine where and how much you can save on energy costs.

This audit is highly comprehensive, but one of the things that the auditor will calculate is your air leakage rate. Audits vary from provider to provider, but a main component of almost all tests is blower door tests. During this test, a large fan is fitted into the frame of one of your exterior doors. This fan sucks out air from the inside of your home. To equalize the pressure, exterior air will flood into your home anywhere it can. These areas of air infiltration will be easily identified by your auditor using an infrared camera or smoke pencil.

You can conduct an informal energy assessment yourself but bear in mind that a self-assessment will be nowhere near as comprehensive and complete as one provided by an energy auditor. For one thing, these technicians have access to a wide range of tools that can help them identify areas of concern, including not just infrared cameras and blower doors, but also:

• Combustion analyzers
• Manometers
• Watt meters
• Digital probe thermometers
• Draft gauges
• Moisture meters
• And more

While there’s an expense associated with hiring a professional to complete an assessment, you can recuperate these costs through energy savings. Most homeowners find their energy bills are reduced between 5 and 30 percent after making home improvements suggested by an energy auditor.

Caulking and Weatherstripping

Small cracks and gaps around moveable and stationary fixtures can be sealed using caulking and weatherstripping. Typically, caulking is used on immovable cracks, while weatherstripping is appropriate for doors and windows that are regularly opened and shut.

Some other areas that may be worth caulking include:

• Plumbing
• Ducts
• Wiring
• Baseboards
• Cabinets

The main culprits tend to be doors and windows. Caulking should be done at the joints between the wall and frame, as well as the frame and glass. Likewise, joints between your exterior door frames and walls should be sealed with caulk.

In contrast to caulking, weatherstripping attaches to only one side of the joint. It is typically placed on the bottoms of doors and windows or the points at which these fixtures come in contact with the frame. Some of the most common types of weatherstripping include:

• V-strips or tension seals
• Felt weatherstripping
• Rubber tape
• Tubular rubber
• Door sweeps
• Reinforced vinyl, foam or silicone
• Bulb thresholds
• Fin seals

It is very likely that you already have weatherstripping on your doors and windows, but due to regular use, these products generally only last about five to ten years, depending on the type and style. If you’ve owned your home for many years and haven’t yet replaced your weatherstripping and caulking, chances are you’re long overdue to do so.

Update Your Windows

As a Kansas City homeowner, you probably already know how important double-pane windows are for keeping your home warm during the winter. Double-pane windows typically last an average of 20 years before their seals start to fail.

As the name suggests, double-pane windows are made up of two panes of glass. In between these panes is a gas—typically argon—that provides insulating protection. By the time these windows have reached the end of their lifespan, the gas has typically escaped. And where gas has escaped, so too will air leakage occur. If your windows are over twenty years old, or you think you may only have single-pane windows in your home, making an upgrade will boost your home’s energy efficiency immensely.

Use Spray Foam

When you think about your home’s insulation, you probably picture those big strips of fluffy pink insulation within your wall cavities. The quality of insulation is usually rated according to a measure called ‘R-value,’ which describes the thermal resistance of a material. Fiberglass and cellulose insulation are hotly debated yet are comparable insulation materials in so far as their R-values are concerned. Yet, there’s one material that far exceeds these—spray foam.

There are two types of spray foam insulation: open cell foam and closed cell foam. Open cell foam is low density and therefore allows air to pass through. It is also susceptible to holding water. Closed cell foam is much denser and creates a perfect air barrier. You’ll typically find that closed cell foam has an R-value of about 6.5 to 7.0, whereas the R-value of cellulose and fiberglass is around 3.5, give or take.

Wondering why all homeowners don’t just exclusively use spray foam? This product is expensive, making it best suited for small areas of application. It’s generally recommended that closed cell foam be used to effectively seal spots experiencing air leakage in an Overland Park building before being topped off with fiberglass or cellulose insulation.

Upgrade Your Insulation

Once all the major air leakage areas have been filled with closed cell spray foam, you may want to top up your batt or loose-fill insulation, particularly in cavities such as your attic, basement, garage and crawl spaces. Like weatherstripping and caulking, insulations can begin to break down and compress over time. When this happens, it becomes less effective and your R-value in these areas decreases.

Unless your insulation has been severely damaged by moisture or pest infestations, insulation removal isn’t generally recommended. Instead, your air leakage expert may add blown-in fiberglass or cellulose insulation to your space to increase the R-value. When combined, spray foam and cellulose (or fiberglass) insulation can eliminate almost all air leakage in Overland Park buildings.

Additional Tips and Tricks

By following the above steps, you can effectively prevent air leakage in your Overland Park home. A few extra steps that your energy auditor may suggest include:

• Regularly cleaning out your dryer vent to improve the appliance’s efficiency
• Keep your fireplace dampers firmly shut when not being used
• To seal areas around hot appliances and equipment such as furnaces and water heaters, create a sheet metal barrier or enclosure around these fixtures and seal with furnace cement caulking

Can Your Home Be Too Sealed?

When researching air leakage in Overland Park, you may come across information that suggests that buildings have air leakage requirements and too much sealing can reduce indoor air quality. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘tight house.’ Certainly, this would be true if you had no ventilation whatsoever. However, the goal of air sealing is to eliminate uncontrolled air leakage in an Overland Park building. For improved air quality, air sealing experts recommend sealing all air leakage in Overland Park homes and installing mechanical ventilation solutions that are tailored to your home’s unique needs.

There are three main types of mechanical ventilation:

• Exhaust-only ventilation. These push air out of the home and encourage air to flow inside of the home through windows and doors.
• Supply-only ventilation. As the opposite of exhaust-only, these pull exterior air into the home and encourage air to leave the home through ducts.
• Balanced ventilation. As the name suggests, this type of ventilation both draws fresh air in and pushes air out.

If energy costs are a concern, solar attic fans are a great option. These fans won’t cost you anything to run while also providing much-needed attic ventilation that will benefit your whole home by improving your indoor air quality. By reducing unwanted moisture, these fans can also prolong the life of your roof and protect your newly installed insulation.

Hire An Expert Insulation Company To Eliminate Air Leakage In Your Home Today!

As a type of uncontrolled ventilation that can drive up energy costs and reduce your overall comfort, air leakage in Overland Park homes is a problem that many homeowners see high returns on by preventing. At Koala Insulation of South Kansas City, our insulation experts can conduct a thorough inspection of your home to identify areas of air leakage in a home, seal these air leaks and install blown-in insulation to increase your home’s energy efficiency and subsequently reduce your utility bills.

While we’d love to provide you with a quote over the phone, we need to see your place in person to provide you with the most accurate estimate. To find out more about our air sealing service in Overland Park and surrounding areas, contact us to set up a free consultation and estimate today at 816-929-8255 or by filling out our online contact form.